I have been working on getting the most R out of my trades as possible. I see you made the rule of not touching your stops until an hour after entry.

Do you have any rules for holding a portion of the position until the close, if the stock is acting well? Working with pivot stops and selling partials has helped me. Curious on your thoughts. Do you rely on market action, your gut, targets, or some other stop-loss method?

My strategy would not change and I can’t imagine myself ever using targets like that. That’s breaking the rule of letting your profits run. My stops would be (are) the same regardless of my equity — my initial stop is at a loss of X% of my equity.

Hi Mike,

I tried to leave this comment but your site asked me to ‘login’ - I couldn’t find anywhere to login on your site. Anyway, here it is:

Mike,

re position sizing (high priced vs low priced stocks) 2% is 2% or am I missing something? shouldn’t the % be more important than $?

I’ve noticed that low priced stocks tend to run as much, if not more than high priced ones (if you’re scanning real time and looking for volume spike and unusual price pattern setups)

Look at SYNM or ALO today (Aug 22 ‘05)I would have rather traded those than GOOG

Also, if you’ve recently switched mm rules, what were you using before?

Cheers

Robert,

There should be a link to sign in right after the sentence that says “You are not signed in. You need to be registered to comment on this site.” The link says ” Sign in” I wonder why you don’t see that. What browser are you using?

To your question, yes, 2% is 2%, but would you rather make 2% on $50,000 or $10,000?

I agree that you can often find more low priced stocks that have big % moves as compared to high priced stock. The issue I’m addressing is can you find a tight enough stop on those super-volatile stocks to allow you to put a good amount of money to work and still keep your initial risk manageable. I just find that, in general, it’s much easier to do that with higher-priced, more liquid stocks.

You’re right, it’s no puzzle to find the big movers with a real-time scanner. But they may or may not give any entry points that suit my trading style.

I guess mm = money management? I described my old position sizing strategy on that position sizing post.

yes I’ve been using trade-ideas all day, every day. You’ll have to decide for yourself whether it’s worth $45/month to you. The price seems very reasonable to me. I’m going to do a write up on it later which may answer your questions about how it’s helpful.

If you’re interested in it you should just sign up for the free trial They don’t even ask you for any payment information when you sign up so it’s truly risk-free on your part.

enjoy your posts “greatly”…

I see you post a link to trade-ideas.com
do you use it that much (and is it worth the monthly fee)? and in what ways regarding your swing/daytrading areas?

Thanks in advance for all your help… it’s much appreciated from the newbie’s

jaz