When I'm bailing, yes, my confidence in the position has been crushed, or atleast my confidence on not losing more than I should is crushed. Hopefully most of the time my original timing is qualified and justifies a position as well as increasing it if necessary. (usually it is or I wouldn't survive imo.) So when the market is going against me, its up to analytics to determine whether its an increasingly greater opportunity or not (which it should based on my system). However if I don't think it is, or I'm feeling weak and chicken out like a sissy (its not all a science ), I won't pyramid the position for gains, but only scale conservatively in a linear fashion to try to recover loses. More power to people that can make a good living without scaling. Without it tho, they'll miss opportunities to increase a good position at a cut-rate cost.
Some technical trading systems use indicators (rather than prices) to determine when it's time to exit. For example, Code: Enter long if (RSI(14)[yesterday] < 20) AND (RSI(14)[today] > 20) AND (ADX(14)[today] > ADX(14)[yesterday]) Exit long if (ADX(14)[today] < ADX(14)[yesterday]) Systems like this one don't have exit prices so they can't place "stop" orders. Further, since ADX calculations use the High and the Low and the Close, you can't deploy the Excel Solver to find a price that will make ADX decrease, so you can't "reverse engineer" an exit price and call it a "stop".
were is " when i start to cry i know i have finally had enough pain and and take the HUGE LOSS " toothless worthless jake
I've been using fixed stops with bond futures and the problem I've been running into is that my stops tend to be too tight in a volatile market but ok in a tame market. Was thinking of setting stops based on a running standard deviation (think Bollinger bands) so they would be wider during periods of greater volatility. Any ideas from the great minds here?