Life Is Short
- Thread starter realtrades
- Start date
Account opened on July 31st, with $5k deposit, only short/day trades, +47% gain so far, just trying to extract money from the market each day I trade, limited by PDT rule, trying to avoid getting greedy, one losing day thus far, lost $550 shorting $GME, should have never happened, was up, did not take profit, might have been a blessing in disguise for the long run.
Not a fan of paper trades, serves no purpose for me, you can't replicate the real thing, either you have skin in the game or you don't.
This is an algo so it doesn’t matter whether paper or not. It doesn't have feelings about having skin in the game, and doesn't trade differently whether having skin in the game or not. It actually accounts for a lot of slippage (getting worst price within 1 minute) to make sure that live trading works better. But live trades would need to be different anyway because short share availability is different at different brokers.
I could trade these live but I would be (and was) getting only 30%+ of trades through, only because of limited HTB availability at my brokers. The algo basically shows more trades then I could handle live, but others may be able to trade more of them.
I use it to validate claims that traders make money by shorting penny stocks. Many people don't believe this, so my algo proves that such strategies do work.
(the algo works in live too btw, just not as profitable as humans can be, and further limited by margin requirements, liquidity issues and HTB availability).
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@realtrades, do you have any issues using IB trading low floats? Are you using aggressive limit orders at all?
A little bit of all of the above, first thing, I check the scanner, only scan for stocks that are below $10, I go through each 1 by 1, checking why it's up, news, PR, check the float, short % of the float, support/resistance levels, check who's pumping it on Twitter, once I find one that fits my criteria, I focus on it for an entry.
Today's trade was a low float, 3 million, I was scaling into the trade, then shares became unavailable, thankfully I was able to add a bit at the top, wanted more though, but generally IB is good with borrows, even though I haven't really traded low floats, this was I believe the smallest float stock I've traded.