Successful trading is about managing trades once you are in them, regardless of where they came from. I think a great trader could probably turn a profit taking random trades, as long as he manages them well. Now I do believe that finding quality chart patterns is essential, mostly because trading good setups in liquid stocks allows for the best risk/reward relationship on the front end. That is why I run my swing trading website – to highlight the best charts in the market for potential trades. My trade selection process is based on my ability to manage those trades, therefore I want to find only the best. Why not predetermine your stop in case you are wrong by taking the trades with a natural stop-loss nearby?
Having said that, let me touch on the last comment regarding stops. One of the first things I want to know before I take a trade is how much I am likely to lose in case I am wrong (and I will definitely be wrong some of the time). This helps me to determine two things: position sizing and profit expectation. If I am willing to lose $1000.00 on a trade and the natural stop is 1 point away, then a position size of 1000 shares will be obvious. Furthermore, if I want to keep my reward-to-risk relationship at 3 or 4 to 1, then I would look to pull at least 3 times my potential loss out of the trade on the profit side. This would be a 3 point profit for this example.
Now, how do I go about finding those trades? Each night I begin with all the stocks in the market and run some basic scans on them which filter out the low-dollar stocks and the low-volume stocks using TCNet, my charting software. Once I have the remaining list, which is typically about 1600 stocks, I sort that list by their close relative to that day’s range. This simply means the stocks at the top of the list finished the day near their highs, and the stocks at the bottom of the list finished near their lows. Sorting by this helps me to first find my likely long candidates and then move on to the short candidates, as I typically like continuation plays. Once the list is sorted, I use the spacebar to screen each stock in pretty rapid succession. Going through the list takes me about an hour. Simply scrolling through so many stocks each night also helps keep tabs on the overall market health
Having said that, let me touch on the last comment regarding stops. One of the first things I want to know before I take a trade is how much I am likely to lose in case I am wrong (and I will definitely be wrong some of the time). This helps me to determine two things: position sizing and profit expectation. If I am willing to lose $1000.00 on a trade and the natural stop is 1 point away, then a position size of 1000 shares will be obvious. Furthermore, if I want to keep my reward-to-risk relationship at 3 or 4 to 1, then I would look to pull at least 3 times my potential loss out of the trade on the profit side. This would be a 3 point profit for this example.
Now, how do I go about finding those trades? Each night I begin with all the stocks in the market and run some basic scans on them which filter out the low-dollar stocks and the low-volume stocks using TCNet, my charting software. Once I have the remaining list, which is typically about 1600 stocks, I sort that list by their close relative to that day’s range. This simply means the stocks at the top of the list finished the day near their highs, and the stocks at the bottom of the list finished near their lows. Sorting by this helps me to first find my likely long candidates and then move on to the short candidates, as I typically like continuation plays. Once the list is sorted, I use the spacebar to screen each stock in pretty rapid succession. Going through the list takes me about an hour. Simply scrolling through so many stocks each night also helps keep tabs on the overall market health
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