Flowta Regular  Posts: 92 Joined: 1/12/2004 Location: Canberra Australia  User Profile | Hi Scrappy Sorry to take so long to respond, Ive been travelling this week. A difficult question to answer, for two reasons. First, the more I look at trading the more I suspect that exits are the really hard part. To date I have been looking at medium to longer term trend trading. The philosophy I am developing for my own trading is a reasonably tight (position sizing determined) stop on entry, following that up quickly as the position moves up (and of course they always do :) to a break even level, and from then on I follow up more gradually to a wider stop level to allow the position to breathe. I never move a stop down. So far, this has seen me take approx 45% losing trades, about 45% small winners, and the remainder as reasonable returns. That was in a rising market (recently changed). With a longer time frame, getting in to and staying with that 10% is the objective. So a combination of strict and trailing stops is indicated. As well as the canned OT stops, using reversing signals, and plugging in a separate system (or two) to the orders bar are extremely useful ways to create 'additional' stops in OT (if you have the full strategies editor). I also fiddle with developing some of my own systems using the SDK, and some of these have potential as stops. But I wont make these generally available because I consider them as my contribution to other Nirvana Club members, many of whom have also contributed Club material for members. So the experiments I usually run for stops are along the lines above. One final point Scrappy that may or may not be useful, I usually try to have all my development (stops and entires) based on fully non optimised systems. This gives me a clear basis for comparing approaches. Thats not to say that I wouldnt turn some limited optimisation on later once I was happy with the basic system if I thought it useful. Hope this helps Scrappy Gary | |
