Agree with Dizzy about the mental stops. I park (prepare) two orders and as soon as I enter a trade with one - I submit my stop order too. During the trade it is very easy to adjust the stop on the fly and control your âtrailing stopâ.
Huios, my opinion is that you have to enter your stops in the market. be consequent. this procedere might creating some problems/frustrations by getting stopped out to early etc. but the source of this problems is surely not the fact of entering stops in the market. and if you are not able to make some profit with the use of stops, you will neither do it without stops. just my opinion. if i want to go long, then -> first step: i enter/transmit a sell stop order x points under the current price. second step: i transmit my buy order... trading
Huios, Please tell us that you made money today!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I am keeping my fingers crossed!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Heck of a move today.
Sorry Sean, lost 1.75 on one trade this morning. And it was a great move today. 70 pts up. NVests and I talked premarket today and we both figured that the direction was gonna be up. Had the direction down, but got stopped and didn't re-enter right away. Net for the day: -92.30
Gonna start putting hard, not mental stops in the system. Gotta get stuff out of my head, cuz, it (my head) don't seem to be working so well. Gonna play with the IB demo tomorrow morning before she opens. What I would like to do is have both orders ready, and all I have to do is just click transmit, and sit back and enjoy. It hits my objective, or I get stopped. After 3 pts the stop gets moved to b/e. After 5 pts I tag on a 2 pt trailing stop, although I'm pretty sure IB doesn't have this capability. This might have to be a mental, not sure. If we have a big bar with a volume spike, out on a market.
You should look into IB's API. I learned Visual Basic just for the purpose of automating my stop logic with my own program. I don't use TWS anymore. So basically my Tradestation strategy gives me my entry buy/sell stop, I enter the trade using the program I created and it automatically manages my stops and exits the trade for me.
Just printed my statement. If I would have just held onto that first trade, and exited at the close 844.00, I would have made $3,062.50 minus $4.80 in commissions. Something like a 30R trade.
That is something I would like to do in the future. Not sure what it will entail, but would be worth it down the line. Thanks
I was very temp to make a 'should have...would have' comment about the first trade, practically speaking it doesn't contribute anything so I bite my 'tongue'. Just let it go, Woddie always said 'there will be another trade come along'.
Huios, about yesterday, I've been trading for many years, mainly ftse,dax and mini s&p, and yesterday I lost money on the s&p cause I could'nt get my head around the fact that that it was going up. The fact that I was long stocks also did'nt help my futures trades. The point is that its soooo easy to look at the chart at the end of the day and say if only I had done this or that. Forget it!