Hope everyone is having a nice holiday weekend. Let's say I have a long position in APPL with 10 shares and the current price is 100. When the price is 110, I want to not only take profit (selling my 10 shares) but also immediately be short 10 shares in the same symbol, reversing my position. I was thinking I could use a bracket order (parent being the order that initiated the long position) with the child being a sell limit order and its quantity = parent order's quantity + 20 (10 - 20 = -10). However, from my tests, the quantity of the child order must be equal to that of the parent. So using bracket orders wouldn't work. How can I implement this? Limit on touch order with the auxPrice = limitPrice = 110 and quantity = 20 and submit this order separately after sending the order to initiate the long position? However, I don't want the LIT order to execute until after my order initiating my long position has been filled. How can I do this?
If I understand you correctly, you're saying create a parent order with a child order to sell 10 shares. Then a child of that child to sell 10 shares? Doh, I don't know why I didn't think of this...they all have the same quantity so this might work.
It's a bracket order. https://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/trading/orders/bracket.php Parent is the main order. In a typical bracket order, the child orders is 1 take profit order and 1 stop loss order. When the parent order gets filled, the child orders begin "active". When one child order gets filled, the other child orders are canceled. That's just a simple example. The child orders can be parent to more child orders. Like a tree graph.
Parent child orders are not required. If you Buy 10 shares at $100, and want to reverse to 10 short at 110, entry a limit order to sell 10 long and another sell 10 Short at $110. Just that simple.
Thats the first time I've heard a bracket order referred to as a parent/child order. Why not just place sell limit order for 20 shares at $110? That would close out your long position and instantly open a short position.
Right but I want to do it as a group, in an automated fashion. So if the order to sell 10 long shares does not execute for whatever reason, I don't want to execute the order that go 10 shares short. I tested making the order to sell 10 long shares the parent of the order to go 10 shares short on the paper account and this seems to work.
I tried that already and it didn't work. In a bracket order, the parent and child orders all need to have the same quantity. I also want to submit the original order to open the long position, the take profit order, and the order to reverse the position all in a single group without manual intervention. So what I did (what @Robert Morse said lit a lightbulb in my head), is to create 2 bracket orders, one a bracket of the other. All the orders in this bracket configuration have the same quantity, so this would work.