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Politics : High Tolerance Plasticity -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: RWS who wrote (12821)	3/9/2002 12:39:31 AM
From: RWS	Respond to of 23153

OSX charts posted at groups.yahoo.com RWS

To: RWS who wrote (12821)	3/9/2002 11:53:42 AM
From: kodiak_bull	Respond to of 23153

Using Stops: [RWS: I've never heard of ATR--thank you for bringing this up; I think I'll try to suss it out for now. I just looked at it for NXTL and it's quite high.] This is a very valuable discussion. The subject of stops is basically part of the most important 1/2 of investing: Knowing when to sell and actually selling. Like Dabum, I use mental stops rather than actual stops, although there have been times when actual stops would have helped me a great deal. My approach is to try to understand from a technical point of view why I bought the stock (or sold the stock) in the first place. For example, I bought NXTL on 2/21 at $4.61. I was a little late (maybe 30 cents) in buying because I didn't know of it until Steeliejim brought it up on the board. stockcharts.com[h,a]dhclyyay[pd20,2!b10!b20!b50!b100!b200!f][vc60][iut!Lk14!Lb14!Ld20!Lc3!Lf!Lh14,3!La12,26,9]&pref=G Looking at the big selloff day and recovery the next day (a bullish harami), the good volume and the continuing recovery I made a judgment that this was likely to recover "toward the mean" somewhere between the 10 and 20 DMA at the time, which was in the $5.90 area. So, a reasonable sell goal to me was $5.75, which I nudged down to $5.74 and put in the GTC order to sell. I try to do that right away so that if the stock suddenly surges it will hit. My sell price would give me a 24.5% return if and when it hit, so anytime within a couple of months would be satisfactory from a capital investment point of view. On the downside, I was willing to hold NXTL unless and until it broke down through the pattern I had bought from. Mentally that was about $4.10, so that's what I thought about, although I didn't do anything about it (put in a stop loss order, etc.). I just thought if it broke down through $4.10 on a close then I %$##ed up small time, should take my loss and move on. In any event, I went skiing on Wednesday, NXTL hit my sell and I was out. Since then it's gone higher and if I had been in town I might have altered my sell order (let 1/2 stand and raised the other another 50 cents) if I could have seen the nice action in time. I can't go back and undo the trade, though, and an 11 or 12 day trading profit of 24.5% can't be sniffed at. Kb