I cannot seem to find it, under whose name the keys are posted? What's the name of the thread? Thanks.
I believe this is the post you are looking for: http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&postid=3588664#post3588664 -river
I could be wrong but I think the two most common exit strategies are scaling out and/or trailing a stop.
I have lost more money on systems that have you get in or out on a moving average. It intuitively seems the safest strategy to possibly use. After 15 years of trading I will never use averages for entry/exit again. I have several reasons why that you may not have thought of, just psychoilogically. But anyway....have you thought about Fibonacci clusters(yes they do work with the right software and trader!) or Harmonics like Gartley patterns? peace, Vince
CW may suggest this to you. Both are used by those who do not know what is going on. Both leave money on the table. A new phrase is coming into the picture; it shows more about the CW type thinking. To extract the full offer of the market, it is best to use leading indicators of price. To place an order a person uses at least two variables. As you grow more able, your orders all have partial fills to get your order filled. An OTR chart is good to use because the bars all have two values. This means you can see that taking the full offer of the market is like a flight of stairs unfolding. The ends of flights on OTR charts often show as odd or even harmonic charts. The Odd is a HS and the Even is a DB or DT. Either way you can optimize your net on any hold; my term for it is the "second chance". For intraday trading the ES e-mini you can see 20 to 40 profit segments a day. It is best to also use the data of the future to be able to carve the turn by knowing well in advance where the OTR extreme is going to happen. Here you use derivatives as expressed statistically. The concept you deploy is the knowledge you have about "big money". Big money outsmarts itself all the time in two ways: It plays a few games (adding and pulling kinds of orders it does not want executed) and it does not take into account that FIFO is how market trading order is managed by market owners. What is VERY evident is the limit of the flight of stairs. This limit I have named "the WALL". All ranges end with walls so there are always two walls showing. The walls contain the flights either way. This means you can set up a series of trades in advance since you know where the flights end at all times for both long or short holds. By looking at the derivative of volume, you can easily reckon whether the wall is greater than the trading velocity or less than the trading velocity. There are places called "lurches" in trading. This is where "big money" trades are left as the trading bounces off the known wall. Big money is left in the lurch. Take a look at big money performance and take a look at vendor sold methods. They leave traders in the lurch all of the time. Observe the daily range and how many times a day it is achieved. There are also 240 trading days in a year. As you look at the daily range being set up, you find that it is three profit segments from one side to the other. As you learn to "read" the market, you come to use leading indicators of price. Price is a lagging indicator. If you read a post and a person is chatting about looking at price where bars are longer than OTR, you know he is lagging trader by his choice. When you look at the DOM to see the walls that end profit segments, you are not looking at PA; you re using TA to read volume. There are a lot of posts by people who have learned through failure that they cannot use TA. The reason TA fails for them is that they are using the wrong market variable. Every academic paper written so far also uses the wrong TA variables to make proclamations. So who controls the markets? The minority does. The majority sets up the walls and they get left in the lurch. The minority is what is used up to cause price to change. On the DOM you always can see the sentiment direction by watching the minority getting eaten up and price, then moving away from those (the majority) left in the lurch. All skilled traders use the orders you never see. They are the fast track orders of experts. People say they have never seen me trade. They are correct; I never show my hand. Sometimes when a real shithead is on my case I post aqll my trades for the upcong day a day in advance and I post just where in time the daily range is to be set and when the major slow trend sentiment is goingt to change. Mostly, these types of people cannot follow my "trades in advance" postings. the best rule for going to the sidelines is the one that is based upon feelings. If you feel even a tinge of anxiety, fear or anger, immediately get out of the market. I go into the market upon open (12 plus seconds and up to 30 secoonds after open). I stay on the correct side of the market by reversing as each profit segment comes to an end. Hold/reversal instead of the common CW approach of entry/bet//stop/exit. I am in the market until bar 78 when the margin changes. I use about 94% of my capital in the market all of the time. My mix of feelings are comfort, support and confidence because I always know that I know.
Personally, I tend to set a TP for my trades when I first place the trade, a point at which the trade would close automatically. This is generally at a sensible Support or Resistance level, which might be an EMA, a zone on the chart, but basically an area with a PA reason to think things might turn around. Once I am in the trade, I usually then trail my Stop once things are underway, so if there is a Reversal before Price hits my TP I am out with some profit, or at BE, whatever. My original TP is usually sensible but moderately ambitious, so if Price flies I'll get there but not always. I will only take a trade with sufficient room to move that even an interim close pays a decent return.
Why using volume then if you know the WALLS in advance?If i knew the WALLS in advance,i`d just play ping-pong