Recent content by otayah

Enter with iceberg orders, exit with stop-loss market orders (or preferably target limit orders) One of my theories was that entering a single order of $100k (5000 shares of a $20 stock, 2000 shares of a $50 stock, etc.) made bots or market makers think an individual retail trader just made a...

Original poster here. I've been busy with other stuff, but wanted to report back my initial findings. I've kept using IB with my stops on the IB server. But I reduced my order size from $100k to $10k and am using iceberg orders with 100-share display size. So far, it seems that price is...

It might be a week or two, but I will periodically report back to this thread after I try different solutions. If anyone has further thoughts in the meantime, I welcome them. Especially if you have experienced this firsthand when trying to scale up strategies that were previously working.

All good thoughts, thanks. Hopefully some combination of iceberg and scaling in will work. Do odd lots set off bots? I like the TWS chart trader's option to buy in preset $ amounts instead of only preset share amounts. But of course that ends up with a strange-looking order (1261 shares...

Forex has exponentially more volume than even SPY. However, I thought jumping in with $100k in the highly liquid stocks I'm trading wouldn't gain attention. It makes up only a small fraction of the volume in the 5-minute candles I look at. Perhaps 5-10% at most. Hopefully some solution...

So I guess Futstrader believes that IB is lying and doesn't hide your stop, and shows it to others? Or somehow uses it against you themselves? Otherwise, nobody should be seeing my "cards" except the server at IB, which is suposed to wait to send it to market only after that price is hit.

Okay, thanks. I'll take a look next week and try to report back if you have email alerts when someone replies to this thread.

Are you suggesting 200 shares total regardless of stock price? Or 200 share blocks combined to equal $100k? I trade stocks from $20-$500, so if 200 was the max I could ever trade for $50 stocks then it won't really be very profitable.

I haven't tried manual stops just because I liked the idea of the instant safety net that comes with bracket orders. Do many people really think brokers sell stop orders or market makers hunt stops themselves? I'm still inclined to think it's bots. I wonder if bots or market makers would be...

Maybe IB not hiding stops was the wrong conclusion. Maybe a better explanation would be that the bots see a large order that doesn't seem institutional, then the bots continue to push price further on low volume until that exact large order amount is puked out, and then they stop moving...

I manually backtested an equities strategy on 6 months of charts and it gave 200% annualized returns. Then I live-tested it in simulation on IB with even better results (since my targets were often hit intrabar and I couldn't see that in backtesting). BUT every time I use real funds, the...

For people who have been day trading stocks for 2, 5, 10, 20 years: 1. How have intraday price channels changed over the years? 2. Do price channels last shorter or longer than in the past? (I'm specifically referring to the smallest channels visible on 3-min or 5-min charts that often...

Thanks for the replies. Yeah, I'll have to forward test it but I feel like the IB demo account probably isn't realistic and was looking for some reassurance before spending actual money. Related to the forward test and slippage: 1. Could I test it with just 20-50 share blocks instead...