Using both Hard & Trailing OTO Stops: ideas?

[murray t turtle]

Another red day, -328 with 104 trades

Lessons learned:

+ Stop overtrading.

+ Only trade outside charts, eg above prior days high. I took too many shots at decent but not great setups.

+ Great tight stops well taken, but death of thousand cuts since choppy day. Looser stops would not have helped.

+ Don't trade 11-3


Action items:
- Turn off monitor at 11 for a week
- limit to 10 trades/day unless exceptionally strong volatility
- instead of 100-700 shares/trade, I'm going to 50 shares max, unless rockstar charts
- tighten daily loss max limit from 500 to 150

%%
IF i did lose money on spxu, TWM, TZA/ but made money on TQQQ,SPXL... in AUG/SEPT;
SEPT is actually still a HI probability month to make money on TWM,TZA, SDS,SPXU, spxs.
I'M not predicting i make more on my TZA, TWM+ QLD..... next week than my spxu, but those charts look much better than my spxu........................................................................
Me, even if i lose on my inverse trades in sept, worse case, i make sure not to lose all my3x ETFs AUG profits. SPXU did not range good today unless some one was short it...

 

[KCalhoun]

I'll try testing this next week

test OTOCO

tight hard stop .2 max with loose .4 trail
eg it opens at 20
OT a) buy abc 20.2
OC b) hard stop 20
O c) trail stop .4

 

[Bad_Badness]

Ken,

Different setups apply to different times of day. Consider using 3 types of setups-tactics: AM, mid day, PM. Then consider that these apply to market action, not time of day, per se. It is just that they normally occur at that time of day.

If you are day trading and you have mastered setups for different type of market action, then the issue becomes more of what type of setup to use.

The transitions can be tricky, sometimes. You should have indicators for transitions. Like a setup, but not for trading but for changing setups-tactics to match the appropriate market action. Also, you can consider not trading during the transitions or keep your stops tight, as solutions.

Hopefully, your setup-tactics are flexible enough so you can adjust your entries and targets, while keeping your stops for ALL setups. This is better for handling the transitions, than adjusting all 3, imo.

Lastly, this is all generic. A more finely detailed, smaller finer granularity wrt market action, is better. But I leave that to you and hope you get the general idea.