Flexible stops

This morning I checked my trading accounts and saw that my shorts were in good shape so I just left them alone but my long position pre-market quotes were very close to the stop loss settings. This should be expected after the poor employment report this morning...so I cancelled all my long stops.

My thinking:

Employment numbers are released regularly enough that the repercussions may only last a day or two and most of the drop, if there is no other equally bad news, will happen before the market opens.

Stops cancelled and reset after I see that my "worst case stop settings" held...so I just used those for today. This strategy seems to have paid off as my positions have bounced back somewhat.

I waited until things more less less appeared to settle down to buy another long position, which may or may not pan out, it was a good technical trade.

I then took some time to set up my other stocks with entry alert triggers in Esignal. I will get nice sounds indicating that another stock has entered my buy zone and I can monitor them to see if they are good prospects. Perhaps send some limit orders in and set some more alerts to let me know when they fill so I can place stops accordingly...although I am running out of cash to enter more trades with it tied up in six right now.

With the US long weekend here tomorrow I decided to only buy the one and wait and see what happens Monday. I figure that everyone (except those that actually lost their jobs and are still out of work) will have forgotten that the numbers were poor and it will be business as usual.

Oh, I did jump in at 0933h with a day trade in SDS (leveraged bear SPX ETF). Figured I might as well make a bit of cash on the bad news.

Interesting thing about that trade was my different thinking when placing it. A daytrade that I might typically make will have a very tight stop off the start and I may play with the setting often. This time I set it $1 away at first, moved it up a couple of times, then, once the wind came out of the sails of the market selloff, I bumped it right up tight to exit. Good call but the move ended up not being all that big.

I like longer term trading even if it is longer intraday trading. The stop losses are far greater upon initial inspection though... in the long run they are not really as large.

Jeff.