Originally posted by silk
It seems that i go into mental overload with that many positions. Conentrating in on a few sectors helps and when futures are trending it is easier. But when futures are not trending well and i feal like have either too many shorts or longs and no clue which way the mkt wants to go it can turn into a big mess.
Anyone else day trading this many positions at once? Perhaps its best to only be in that many positions when you have strong conviction about the futures.
What trading platform do you use? In order to actively handle a lot of positions you have to be able track them all pretty much tick by tick because when you work up to 15-20 positions at that point you are often trading mainly off your gross p and l and keying off it as to whether to add long or short exposure.
If you don't know at any given time, how much capital you have committed long and short and where each position is relative to where you bought it you will tend to fell overwhelmed.
For example the few weeks I used redi+ the position monitor would not distinuish between closed profits and open profits in particular stocks and it cost me acouple hundred bucks a day.
I'm watching my p and l start to drop like a rock with the futures steady and it takes me a few seconds to identify which position is getting rolled by a huge buyer or seller. Those few seconds feel like years. Some of the better platform allow you to dynamically sort your blotter by pullback or by gross dollar loss or things like that so what happens is effectively the lossers always "float up" to the top of your position monitor so you can concentrate on killing the losers or the positions that are moving against you the fastest.
Also some platforms don't allow you to bail on positions effectively. For example you can bail on all longs or shorts but that might force you to bail on the few positions that you have put on which actually move opposite the futures or positions that you have established as longer-term swing trades. Or you may have purchased a couple of very illiquid stocks and when you bail on all your longs or shorts because of a futures spike on way or the other, if you can't remove that position it gets punched out too and you might give up a huge spread on an illequid stock stock that really has no correlation to the rest of the market anyway.
For example your long Nemont Mining and have been all day because gold is up. It's walking up slowly all day and you have been adding to it on pull back. Meanwhile you get long some other stocks then the beige book comes out, the market starts to come in hard. You want to bail on most of your longs....but not the gold...the gold stock is probably not gonna come for sale hell it might even ralley. But some programs that bail "all long" or "all short" functionality don't allow you to remove positions...so in essence you hit the key and sell something you don't want to simply because you think in the grand scheme of things you will save more hitting the key than not.....true but if the platform were simply designed better you wouldn't have to.
And then there is yet another factor that is critical when you start handling more and more positions. You need stops you can set that are "server side". That also will help you manage more positions.
The bottom line is if your gonna put on more than a dozen or so positions you had better be able to manage them effectively if you can't eventually you will get drilled.
Avalanche
