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Strategies & Market Trends : DAYTRADING Fundamentals -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Steven Ivanyi who wrote (5672)	11/23/1999 9:03:00 PM
From: E. Davies	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 18137

Hey all. Today I had one of those absolutely terrible trading days. You know-the kind where everything goes wrong and you lose an entire weeks worth of income. Why the heck didnt I just sleep in? The primary reason? I just couldnt get the stink'n fills on the exits. Sure, the first level problem is that I picked mediocre entry positions, but time and time again today I wanted to cut losses or grab a small gain when a profit started evaporating and simply could not. Note I'm describing a long position but the same thing happened today with shorts. Sell @bid. Wait 15 seconds. Watch the stock downtick. Sell @ bid- 1/16. Wait. Watch the stock downtick again.... ARRGH! Try another routing. wait... The only time I was able to get fills was to sell at resistance points, which of course are often the bottom. The problem is of course that the ECN bids evaporate in an instant at any hint of a downturn and you are stuck with the choice of hitting a MM and praying or selling well below bid. I've found that the reason I have a hard time letting winners run is exactly the above. The only time worth selling is into buying, you cant afford to wait until a top occurs. I guess in the end its due to not picking stocks with enough liquidity for the speed they were moving. Faster moving stocks need to have higher liquidities to balance since there are many traders attempting to get in/out at the same time. I think also that highly active stocks where there are lots of MM's & ECN's moving on and off the bid confuse the routing programs. Eric