Monday 20th - the day of the fcuk ups....
OK - so first wierd thing today is my MACCi 60 is still pointing up. Seems like it hardly ever moves - see top left hand chart.
After an hour or so I realised that I had my charts set up wrong & that what I thought was my 60 minute chart was really a daily one
That's better !
Now - shortly after, the 30 min moved against the 60 min.
At this point, the 10 min was turning out of OB & the 5,3,1 all OB. I decided to push the button.
Almost immediately - both trades went my way - RIMM down $1.11 and LVS down $.63. As the 60 & 30 were not in agreement, maybe I shouldn't have taken this but I wasn't expecting to be in for long....
And then Tradestation stopped updating... Radar screen, charts, prices - the lot just stopped. I restarted tradestation - still in profit when it restarted but still no updates on radar screen or charts. I then rebooted the PC...
Not great, eh ? When I rebooted, I was looking at a loss, the 10 min was down more than before but my shorts went the other way. I wasn't sure if it was a data issue - so I stayed in in case I just needed TS to catch up on price data. As soon as the 10 min turned against me, I took a hit & closed out.
So - a few problems
- I got in when the 30 was against me without having clear plan of when to get out if this was to be a scalp. Sure I could say that if TS hadn't crashed, I could have got out in profit - but on what signal ?
- I should have set my stop loss at entry + 2c as soon as I was in profit as it was a riskier trade. I didn't as I wanted to leave some wiggle room. That's the difference between a break even & a $175 loss.
Lessons learnt !
On the bright side, I am getting used to using staged orders in TS - I simply fill it up with my likely trades & quantities & can then press go when desired. I can also set up my 75% scale out trades and complete closes and just select the appropriate one as necessary - it makes dealing multiple stocks much easier. I am using 2 now but as I get used to this will up to 5 and see if that's still manageable. The only downside is I can't use ESL to automate the order staging - now that would be nice....
As you can see - for RIMM & LVS, I have my 75% scale out already entered & just need to highlight them & 'send selected orders' to place them.