Which order type do I need to use?

[Busy Bee]

Hi,
I am trying to figure out which order type I need to use for specific situation, but I can't figure it out, and I wondered if anybody here could help.

Assuming that I want to buy a stock which is currently trading at $25. What I want to do is set up a trailing buy order, but one that doesn't buy at a price higher that $20.

I want to set an offset of, say, $1 so that if the stock fell to $17.50 but then rose back to $18.50 the order would trigger. Likewise, if it fell to $19.50 but then rose to $20, the order would trigger (but would not trigger above $20).

I have spent a lot of time looking at limit-if-touched orders and various other orders, but nothing seems to quite fit.

BTW, I am using Interactive Brokers.

Any help with this would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Steve

 

[Shanghai]

Basically you can't with IB. I have a very similar strategy that I automate that looks for prices rejecting the lows and then rising again. I thought this could be acheieved by having a conditional buy stop order with the condition that prices would first reach a certain low level. However IB only allows a market buy order and not a buy stop if you specify a condition.

The way I got round this was programming this into Ninjatrader and using it in conjunction with IB as data provider.

 

[Busy Bee]

Thanks Shanghai.

I downloaded the free version of Ninja Trader and I think that I got a strategy working, although I can't use it to trade live until I actually purchase a license.

It seems that Ninja Trader has won a few awards, so I was a bit underwhelmed by it when I first installed it. I only imported a few stocks, and found a couple that didn't seem to work (one of them being LON:TNI), it said that they imported fine but then didn't actually get the live data from them.

I have quite a bit of .NET development experience, so at least coding the strategy was fairly easy.

As for the charting, I have found the functionality better in the IB interface but, to be fair, I am no expert in charting, so it is likely that Ninja Trader is probably much better when you want to do your own scripts.