As you're a new trader, personally I think you should 100% use a hard stop. So if your stop loss is $9.90 and the price hits it - it exits you out of the trade automatically. As a new trader a hard stop will protect your account. Yeah, one day you'll stop out by a penny, and it will reverse positively in your direction... But that's better than your new emotions getting in the way, not exiting, and letting your loss build up. Andrew is an expert who uses mental stops. I highly advise against doing that to start.

Hi there, As far as I understand from your post, you may have misunderstood some things about risk management. And that's totally fine, considering that when you start doing this there's a thousand new bits of information coming at you every day. Long story short, the theory is not that you shouldn't SPEND more than 2% per trade, but rather that you shouldn't RISK more than 2% per trade. Let's take an actual example: You have 25K so 2% of that is $500 risk. Say you want to long a stock at a price of $10 and you put your stop loss at 9.50$. This means that you risk $0.50 per share, and given that your max loss per trade is $500 (2% of your account), then the calculation you have to make to decide how many shares you can buy is 500/0.50=1000 shares. Now, one thing I'd add is that, in my humble opinion, risking 2% of your account per trade is way too much, particularly when you're just starting out. Think about it, merely 10 losing trades and your account is already 20% down. I would consider the option of only risking a fraction of 1% because risking too much per trade can throw your psychology off balance in the middle of a trade and make you focus more on potential losses that you aren't comfortable with rather than the proper trade management that you need to produce consistent results. Hope this helps 🙂 Vlad

Those are called Pivot Points. You can add them by right-clicking on a chart and adding a new Study.

Thanks Justin, thats exactly what i'm looking for.

You're probably not getting filled every time because you're Selling on the ASK and Covering on the BID. The +/- you have in that script is doing nothing because the price can't be above the ask when long or below the bid when short. So unless the price is exactly at the bid or ask when you hit the hotkey, it wont go through. Basically you have them backwards. Sell 25% CXL ALLSYMB;Route=LIMIT;Share=Pos*0.25;Price=Bid-0.02;TIF=DAY+;SELL=Send Cover 25% CXL ALLSYMB;Route=LIMIT;Share=Pos*0.25;Price=Ask+0.02;TIF=DAY+;BUY=Send

One could probably make a hotkey where you manually save the ATR in the StopPrice for the stock you are looking at. You would have to know the ATR of the stock (easy), then on the chart double click that ATR amount below the current ask. Your hotkey would be StopPrice=Ask-Price

I understood this to mean that optimally the deal is sealed at that stop price. But he also mentions that the market can breeze past that price without acting on it, in which case you'd have to manually activate a stop (e.g. with a sell-now-at-bid button -- which I've programmed as a result of losing out in a fast-moving market.) I think the ideal would be a 2-step stop; if the market blasts past the first one, a second one set to a level just below (to prevent losses for a bull market) or above (ditto for bear) would be there and would fire at Ask or Bid to ensure that it has a good chance of being filled before disastrous losses. Possibly this has been set up, but I've not seen it anywhere. It's too bad the programming for the hotkeys is so crude; a real programming language would have this sorted with a couple of lines of code.... I'd be happy to be a consultant to do this for the right price 🙂 John.

Thank you boss!! I appreciate the support. I could have definitely got in earlier on my 2nd trade but you did make a great point. It would not have made a difference.