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Strategies & Market Trends : Strictly Buy and Sell Set Ups -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: hubris33 who wrote (9586)	5/9/2006 8:31:05 AM
From: sixty2nds	Respond to of 13449

G'morning H3. Your comments on perspective are understood. 2 things keep me from trading ST. 1. Time constraints 2. No intraday data feed. I can solve #2 but I am stuck with #1. My personal solution is trade intermediate time frame. My standard MO for a trade - I am right or I am wrong. The market will tell me. With my ALGN trade on 4/26 I was WRONG, stopped out in under 3 hours! I seldom build positions or sell partial positions. I enjoy working like a sniper. One shot, one kill. I have found when I have more than 10 open positions at a time I get out of The Zone. I lose something. Trading partial positions would result in running my motor near "the red line" to often. As my new trading journal ages it will reveal the truth about my trades. Things can/will change. Time will tell. Until then it is KISS.

To: hubris33 who wrote (9586)	5/9/2006 11:44:44 PM
From: rchlrvn	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 13449

H3==You mentioned different perspectives on protecting profits. Don't know if this helps anyone, but I once heard a money manager say his rules required giving back no more than 25% profit on a position once it was up by 5%. Examples: 5% profit=$5000, he's out if it dips to $3750; 5% profit=$1500, he's out if it hits $1125. He then adjusted to a different maximum profit percentage giveback once a position was up 10%, then again incrementally as and if it moved higher. I don't recall exact percentages used. His goal was to give a stock room but not leave as much on the table as a stop farther away from where it was trading might. Maybe someone here knows this system, or might devise a similar one. I don't know what he did with a stock up, say 3% that began moving against him. Also, he wasn't a trader. But a similar technique ought to work when trading also, if it's not too cumbersome to calculate and enter via trailing stop or whatever. His rules also required selling any new position down 10%, no exceptions. (His version of stop loss.) As Bum has pointed out many times, with a short time frame, you can't wait 10% before playing defense...maybe 2-3%. Seeing profit evaporate (quickly, usually) is the pits. One of the first books I ever saw on the market quoted an old-timer saying he always made money in the stock market selling too soon. Lot of wisdom there. It's aggravating to see what you "coulda, woulda, shoulda" made if only you'd sold before most of your profit disappeared on the way to hitting your stop. The other side of that is seeing one reverse and move sharply higher AFTER you've protected a nice profit and sold. I've been an all star in the past at this, LOL. Also part of the game, but a part no one likes to see....but it can be helped by selling partial positions.