Scaling out of Positions: Visualized

[Robert H 454]

I have been playing around with my sell/cover hotkeys to see which exit strategy fits my trading style best. I tried exiting in halves (position *0.5), thirds, and quarters.

 

Here is a graph which compares each option and how many shares you have remaining after each press of the hotkey. For example, exiting in halves leaves 50% after the first press, 25% after the second press, 12.5% after the third, and so on.

 

 

I settled with thirds as I have a tendency to exit my winners too early. Pressing the hotkey twice still leaves me with 45% of the original position.

 

What percentage are others scaling out with?

[laurnew 0]

I have both halves and quarters scale out buttons and I often use a combination depending on how the trade is going. Seems to give me what I need for the time being....though I'm still in sim and still getting acquainted with my 'style.' I like your analysis, Robert.

[Paul S 5]

I ususally use quarters to scale out but also have Halves for it it shoots up quick. I recently got the Stream Deck and that has really helped me enter and exit trades much more efficiently. Here is how I have it set up. First screen is both a quick entrance for either short or long positions then if I hit the short or long folders it brings up the other. Last is my most used sites and functions for trading.

 

 

For some reason it wouldn't let me Add Media so I had to use the img code. Hope you can see the pics.

[Robert H 454]

Thanks for the tips, Paul.

 

For some reason images stored on Google Drive don't play nicely with embedding. I've uploaded your media to Imgur and edited your post. Hope you don't mind.

[Robbie Williams 12]

Love that chart Robert! Always good to see in graphical form. I'm like you, I thought that scaling out 50% of a position after the stock has moved maybe 15c or 20c is too much because if it does decide to move up 50C or more, you've probably even taken more off the table by then. For that reason, I've changed my hotkeys to POS=*0.33 which is a 1/3. I found myself getting too much stock off the table too quickly but I haven't had enough time to see whether the 1/3rd works best or not. I do like Pauls idea of having hotkeys for 1/2 and 1/4 but at this stage I have programmed hotkeys on my keyboard and don't want to make it too complicated.