I like that idea. A well defined trade plan with precise entry and exit criteria. I think that's fine for swing and longer term trading. For daytrading, you will need a plan for entry and exit too except it's 100x faster. I guess I need to train myself to be faster. Enter long, put a stop loss order in. Think about an exit target price. Then move stop loss up as it moves in your favor. Then it reverses, go short. Put stop loss order in. Think about an exit target price. Then move stop loss down as it moves in my favor. Do that over and over throughout the day. Whew! That's a lot of trade management. But I guess that's what it takes to succeed in daytrading. Thanks goodness my side business is now beginning to take off. I only daytrade a few hours in the morning. But I feel like mastering daytrading and trade management is the ultimate self discipline for me. If I can do that then I feel I have mastered myself...
Yes it's faster but as a day trader I can tell you it's doable. Most execution platforms these days have an automatic trade management function where as your entry is triggered, it automatically enters your predefined stop and target. You can manually move the stop toward your desired direction and target away but one click and you're in with exit parameters in place....and yes, trading can be a vehicle of self elevation. All the best.
So, you think a bracket order is what I should do? Let me look into that. IB has bracket order but I never use it. For those who have IB, do you know if you can assign hotkeys for bracket orders?
Read the trend correctly and the price movement will tell you when to exit. Having a fixed target price is just your idea, and not what the market's actual price movement will be.. And you will too often fail to see, or believe, an exit indication that falls short of your target. Don't make that an automatic part of your plan. Each reversal indication must be judged, bc a reversal will lead to just a big reaction, a correction, or a new trend. And, exiting a long position is not an automatic signal to take a short position.
Yep, that is bad right there. Any writer who has an influence on you is going to, well, influence your ability to see the markets. You'll have their thoughts ingrained in you as a bias, even if it goes against your own thought processes. I didn't go through all that book-reading when I started, and I had a mentor that gave me the basics. From there on out I developed my own trading style to fit my personality and risk-appetite, among other things. The key metric through it all was to first figure out the kind of trader I was, and then to trade myself. Not trade what other people thought I should trade or how to trade it, but to trade what I would trade how I thought of it. Sorry, that is a bit unwieldy in making my point, but I like your thought process. I shall PM you soon for a confab, we seem to have similar thoughts on this.
I totally agreed. My exit point is not predetermined. It's determined by market action. But my stop loss is fixed. That's how you control risk. Fixed loss and potentially unbounded profits. So today I put in stops. It's good and bad. I got stopped out with small losses. Normally I would hold through that and it would eventually go my way(most of the time... The 1 out of 10 that it doesn't go my way I get destroyed. hehe). But I'm already stopped out. So took small losses. Several small losses add up. But I understand that if I didn't put in those stop losses and if things went really wrong I would be down a lot more. I get it. But I feel like my timing is still slightly off. If I just hone it a bit more then my stops wouldn't get hit right away. But I made back all of my losses this morning easily because my losses were small and manageable. That's lesson #1. The second lesson is obvious but should be mentioned. Not all days will be trendy. Today was range bound. So trade accordingly. In then out then reverse. Then in and out. On trend days you can hold for a long time. For example, 12/29/2017, I put on a NQ short trade near the open and held all day til the close. Not all days will be like that. So gotta be flexible and constantly monitoring price actions to see which kinds of days it is and trade accordingly. Lesson #3, even though the entry pattern might show a particular bias it pays to wait a little before entering to see how it unfolds. I was about to enter a position then I paused just for a second. Then I see it evolving. And it was not the original pattern I thought. So I saved myself. Even if I had put stops in, sure it will have cut losses. Why cut losses when you can avoid it all together?! The next level of improvement would be once I see that it's not the original pattern(long or short) then I should go the other way. So for example I thought it was a short pattern, pause to see(seconds), then when it showed to be a long pattern, jump in and go long. Saving money by not entering the wrong trade is good, but what is better is entering in the right trade and making money. All these lessons take time to be integrated into my thinking and habits. Everything takes time. Losses are getting smaller. And when I lose I'm able to make it back to positive or flat. It's a long journey. No rush. Tweaking and refining these things will help me in the long run. No need to trade size now when I haven't fixed all of my errors, biases, thinking, and acting.
There's a difference between a fixed stop-loss that's a set number of ticks/points/pips (not so good) and a fixed stop-loss that's fixed in a position dependent on the current market volatility, support and resistance when you open the trade (much better). I'm "just saying".
Xela is correct, my ATM triggers a stop which I will not go beyond but I may miss a trade if the S/R level is too far away from entry.
I agreed. But I don't like the pullback to support. I was trying to say I should hone it so that I buy closer to support and put a small stop loss below that rather than chasing prices higher and when the pullback I can't stand the heat and get out. hehe. You are "just saying" correctly.