Talking about risk/reward and scalping, I had a nightmare last Monday on a software failure.
I'm not sure how many of you use TradeMaven to trade. Trademaven went down last Monday morning right after I bought 20 contracts (try to scale out 0.50). I also had 10 more limit buy orders in the scale-in process. TradeMaven went down for several hours. I had the stop loss through a strategy, I thought the positions would be stopped out when the big drop came around 678-679. Unforuntately, the strategy didn't work when the Trademaven severs went down. But the limit buy orders were executed, I ended up with 30 contracts.
By the time I downloaded and used a backup software (TransAct) to look at my positions, ER2 dropped a hard 3-4 points, I was down over $10000 and none of the contracts were stopped out.
Later after I called TradeMaven, I leant what happened. What happened was, one week ago, a Trademaven guy helped me setup an all around strategy to work for both CME and CBOT. I didn't realize the STOP # orders he helped me setup didn't send the stop orders to the exchange UNTIL it hits the STOP price. If TradeMaven is down, or the software is down, or the Internet connection to TradeMaven is lost, the stop orders wouldn't send to the exchange forever. After I did more reading, I found STOP# orders are synthetic stops.
I fight all day Monday with a new trading software but still lost $8K for that day. A very hard lesson learnt. Trademaven released a new version (v3.19) Monday night and fixed its server connection problem. You got to know your trading software inside out. This mistake was 100% my fault, not the software to blame, I should have asked what the STOP # means. This is another reason I didn't post much for the week, still mad at my dumbest mistake
So for other TradeMaven users, please make sure not to use STOP # or STOP LIMIT # on your orders to trade ER2.