I dont get one thing Quah... when you enter the trade .. do you sychronize your watch with the market. Do you just place a market order the second it hits 9:33:01.. And to those that paper trade this method.. how do you account for slippage? --MIKE
I already mentioned that earlier when i said that the reverse trade could be a system all on its own. With that said however, it is only one day's worth of results so I am not going to get excited about it. (He say's while doing cartwheels inside his 10x10 office).
But the original entry is usually a winner too. Why leave money on the table? If there is a higher rate of confidence in the stop and reverse, double up the contract size on the stop and reverse. That way you make money on the winners, and money on the "losers" as well. Scalping like this is really well suited to an automated order entry program like http://www.TradeExecutor.com or some of the freeware programs out there. Disclaimer: I am the owner of TradeExecutor.com. I do make custom extensions for TradeExecutor owners, so I might be adding some features to make this strategy even easier in TE if I get around to trading it myself or a customer requests it. Some ideas I have about this is placing countdown timer within TE so you know when the next bar will open, or even better, automatically send a limit order at the bid or ask at the opening of the next bar! Once filled, the stop loss and profit targets are sent. In fact, if I had decent data feed (which IB is not) to calculate the directional indicator from, I could automate the whole freaking strategy in TE! Maybe the data feed is good enough for stochastics, or at least it is good enough for determining the direction of the previous bar.
I'm really starting to love the idea of these reversal trades. The more I review my own losers, the more I see that if I had reversed, I'd have a lot more capital in my account today. Hmmmm, and with cheap commission rates at IB, there isn't too much lost to commission. There is of course the risk that the reversal fails and you lose on both sides, but that really seems to be such a rare occurrence. This just seems to prove to me that the simplest ideas are often the best.
I just picked a random timeframe of every 15minutes starting at 9:45. This allowed me the occassional cigarette should I wish. It could easily have been every 10 minutes or every time my cat meowed. It would be interesting to see the results if I shifted all trades back or forward 5 minutes.
There is no slippage. Entries and exits are using a limit order. I made sure that the price traded through my limit before accepting an entry as really happening or recording a profit. There may be the occassional time where the price will run away from your limit entry in which case there will be no trade.
If only someone can write up the QUAH API for IB's TWS than we would have the holy grail.. lol.. I'm still curious as to how one picks to go long or short when the clock strikes? How can you use stochastics QUAH? Lets say they are not really showing anything in specific and are neutral? --MIKE
No, I just enter a limit order at the bars opening price - looking at a one minute chart. PATS JTrader makes this sort of entry quick and easy using DOME - all I do is click right next to the opening price of the bar. TWS makes it a little more difficult, but not impossible if you have dummy orders pre-set and your hotkeys set up for quick manipulation of limit prices.
I dont get it. What are you using as the limit.. the open of the bar.. thats impossible to nail in realtime? --MIKE