When to let a stalled trade go...

[Bugsy]

I set an alert for quite a few stocks and one of them hit the next day. Unfortunately I didn't see the alert for a couple of hours. I set a price alert at a specific support level that was 13% below its initial price. It dropped 13.5% the next day, but I didn't see it till it was about 10% below.

I decided to buy in anyways but the stock has now stalled back down to my original alert level (lol). It's still well above my stop loss.

Two questions to the more experienced traders:

1) Should I have still bought in on the late entry? I still believe it has running room for about 20% over the next month or two.

2) This isn't the case at the moment obviously, but I've run onto this before. Do you ever sell a trade at a loss that is well above your stop loss, but stalled in a channel below your buy in? I'm referring to wanting to place the money that's currently tied up into a better trade because you have no clue how long it will be stalled. (Hope that made sense)

Thanks in advance.

 

[Aero73kgp]

I set an alert for quite a few stocks and one of them hit the next day. Unfortunately I didn't see the alert for a couple of hours. I set a price alert at a specific support level that was 13% below its initial price. It dropped 13.5% the next day, but I didn't see it till it was about 10% below.

I decided to buy in anyways but the stock has now stalled back down to my original alert level (lol). It's still well above my stop loss.

Two questions to the more experienced traders:

1) Should I have still bought in on the late entry? I still believe it has running room for about 20% over the next month or two.

2) This isn't the case at the moment obviously, but I've run onto this before. Do you ever sell a trade at a loss that is well above your stop loss, but stalled in a channel below your buy in? I'm referring to wanting to place the money that's currently tied up into a better trade because you have no clue how long it will be stalled. (Hope that made sense)

Thanks in advance.

The 1st argument with her, you call all your friends and experts and discuss stoploss and alerts and whatnot and then bail. And all the while this argument was just in the course of the normal ups and downs of life aka an extant TREND.

Spot the TREND, get on the horse and ride it to its natural extinction for YOUR timeframe of interest.

 

[lindq]

I set an alert for quite a few stocks and one of them hit the next day. Unfortunately I didn't see the alert for a couple of hours. I set a price alert at a specific support level that was 13% below its initial price. It dropped 13.5% the next day, but I didn't see it till it was about 10% below.

I decided to buy in anyways but the stock has now stalled back down to my original alert level (lol). It's still well above my stop loss.

Two questions to the more experienced traders:

1) Should I have still bought in on the late entry? I still believe it has running room for about 20% over the next month or two.

2) This isn't the case at the moment obviously, but I've run onto this before. Do you ever sell a trade at a loss that is well above your stop loss, but stalled in a channel below your buy in? I'm referring to wanting to place the money that's currently tied up into a better trade because you have no clue how long it will be stalled. (Hope that made sense)

Thanks in advance.

Helpful advice from a biblical trader:

Thou shalt plan thy trade and thou shalt trade thy plan. If thou hast a trade, but hast no plan, thou is but a sheep wandering in the dark forest, alas certain to be sheared.

 

[Bugsy]

Helpful advice from a biblical trader:

Thou shalt plan thy trade and thou shalt trade thy plan. If thou hast a trade, but hast no plan, thou is but a sheep wandering in the dark forest, alas certain to be sheared.

Good advice. I should have lit it go when I missed the alert. Thank you.

 

[tomorton]

Yes, I do sometimes manually close trades which are in loss but have not yet triggered the stop-loss. I can do this as I know what set-up I wanted to see that would support taking a position. The stop is placed according to standard rules of TA, but these don't overlap precisely with my set-up guidelines. The set-up suits my strategy.

The moral is you have to know what you're looking for so that you know when you've found it and you also know when you've found something you're not looking for.