Many thanks for the replies. Very useful indeed. Point taken with RIMM on Friday btw. What a ride! nimrodeo
Here is a classical example of greed. Entered EBAY on the inside bar at 40.64 with a stop at 40.47. Risk of 0.17 not too bad. AT R=1 , moved my stop to even and planned to get out at R=2 around 40.98. Of course in the process I got greedy and was stopped out even with a huge P/L of $10.00. Another lesson learned....
milan, the 3rd candle was the first dummy signal candle (the next candle traded above the 3rd's high). Your buy stop would have been at $40.50 and the stop loss a bit lower than the 3rd candle's low; giving $0.30=R (but maybe you weren't watching it at that time to catch this earlier entry). ------------------------------- nimrodeo, any guesses as to what stock was in play today?
babak Just my luck. Major problem with my pc yesterday. Didn't get it sorted 'til after the close. I'll come up with an answer today. nimrodeo
Yesterday I did another dummy trade. In the first hour the markets were going down quite sharply, so I decided to put on a short trade. I looked at several charts and seemed to me that DPH could be a good candidate. I was also looking at other symbols, XLNX for example, but this would have turned out to be a more difficult one, ending stopped out. Since this trade, I've started using 30min bars instead of 15min. I shorted DPH on the third bar (see attachment) at 0.50.The entry has been a little "dirty", technically speaking a less than perfect dummy entry, being the previous (2nd) bar not an inside nor a reversal bar. But it was tiny, thus lessening the implied risk. Besides that, my scanner was signaling a large number of trades on DPH and its reference market (NYSE) was going down more than Naz and AMEX. I set a stop at 0.55 immediately after the fill. The initial risk was a round 10%, so I decided to sell only 2000 shares. Until 13:30 the trade was going pretty much nowhere, and I was considering about closing it, fearing an unexpected event. Then I thought that, after all, the risk has been already limited by the small position, so I resolved to hold tight and wait until EOD. After 14:00 the price started to decline, so I could move the stop to 0.52 and successively to breakeven. Suddenly, while I was manually adjusting my entry/stop levels lines on the chart, there has been a big volume spike, more than 750000 shares at a time. The chart system redrew the whole chart to make room for new data just when I was dragging a trendline with the mouse, sending my line to infinity and scaring the hell out of me for about half a second. At this point I was looking at a 4 hours, 5min bars chart, as a way to magnify the otherwise almost invisible price movements. Then I realized, happily, that the trade was going well. After further trailing the stop, I closed it at 0.37 10min before closing, with a 25.70% gain and a R/R ratio of 2.6/1 on the initial stop, which I consider quite good. The dollar amounts I'm using for these trades are small, so are related P/L, but my objective is to learn to trade manually. Then it will be just a matter (almost) of increasing position size. GS
babak Just preparing for today's session. I assume you were thinking of XLNX for yesterday? Will post for today by 09:00am nimrodeo
You're overanalysing it. What company was all over the news? questions of bankruptcy swirling, etc.? I'm referring to GM of course.