I am struggling with placing stop loss. Your stop loss 9% is from your purchasing price? Previous day high or close? Do you move your stop-loss? Help, please.
Always from purchase price. Don't push it back. Taking a loss on a company never bothered me for more than a day. In fact it feels great to free up that capital and put it towards a new idea. Something that helped me not get so down was to always have a new stock ready to buy. That way you can cycle it in right away after taking a loss. I generally take on 4-8 positions and the 9% was a good value for me. When I began my strat in October I went with 10% and stuck to a position size of $6000 per stock. I never felt comfortable taking a loss of more than $600 so I stuck with it. It worked just fine, but after a few months I noticed that if a company fell in value by 9%, it always followed through and dropped to 10%. So I simply tweaked my rules from 10% to 9%. The percent number should vary with how many positions you take on so what works for me may not work for you. If you are not sure, start with my "9% rule" and stick to it. If and when you get stopped out of a position continue to watch that stock and see how it moves. After a few losses you can start to get a feel if the 9% rule is to tight or loose and you can adjust from there. I hope this helps.
English is not my native language. What do you men by "not push it back?" If you buy a stock at 100, then you set your stop-loss at 91. If your stock lowered to 95, you still keep your stop-loss at 91. Is this what you mean by "not push it back?" If your sock moved to 110 do you raise your stop-loss to 100.1? 9% stop-loss works for you. If I adopt it, how do you decide 9% is too tight or too loose for me? Depending on my position size or my fear to lose? Thank you for sharing.
Yes LNKD will be wild this week, I like how it is managing to move higher while Facebook keeps trending down.
I was discouraged to keep posting after taking an extremely large loss in LNKD due to a 25% gap down on bad earnings. On top of that HII also gapped down from bad earnings. The market has been extremely volatile and I was stopped out of a number of other names, adding to my losses. The losses made me doubt myself and the strategy I use. The damage can be seen on my attached latest ROI. However, I did cut all my losers and kept rotating in names that met my criteria. This has led to a few nice winners. The biggest ones are WWAV and AMBA. I am still holding both those names and a number of other small winners. The gains have led to a full recovery and my account is on the verge of breaking to new highs. No change to my strategy except that I am going from 9% to 8% for my stop loss limits.
Well my risk measures are starting to become attractive again. In particular, my Sharpe Ratio is up to a 2.61 which is mildly impressive. I think I can do better though. I am back to cash for the weekend. My margin levels got up to about 50% for about 3 days as I decided on Tuesday to add heavily to my existing WWAV position. That was irresponsible and I broke my 20% max margin rule. It did work out this time, but I will refrain from doing it again. I normally trade very little and I had held onto these positions for 6-8 weeks. I took gains in AMBA, WWAV, SUM, PAYC, EXR, BERY and a small loss in ABC. I regret buying BERY, I should of bought SEE instead as that was the real market leader in the space. I am also concerned about selling SUM as I think there is more room for growth and they are the clear winner in that aggregate producing industry. Feel free to ask questions, I am weary of posting my buys, as last time I did that all hell broke loose
You can blame Greece for the heightened correlations. Good recovery. If you bring it back to your previous risk levels, people might just ask you for managed account services. Are you setup under a Friends and Family account?