Paper trading. New strategy. Got the entry I wanted out of the first halt going into the second halt and it looked like I was headed for a winning trade. It resumed and immediately dropped.
LESSON: I should have put out a trailing stop order to sell during the halt period. This should have been a winning trade and it turned into a massive losing trade. Halts are tricky and I am slowly learning them. So hard to learn about halts because you have to be in a halt to learn about them and it's a skill in itself to find halts.
I look to add this lesson to my trading plan as a reason to not feel overconfident about halts.
Live to trade another day
Execution detail:
Date/time | Symbol | Side | Price | Position |
---|---|---|---|---|
2020-01-30 09:52:37 | DTSS | buy | $4.500 | long |
2020-01-30 09:59:56 | DTSS | sell | $3.640 | 0 |
No, thank you for commenting. I appreciate it.
I know you cannot create buy and sell orders during a halt BUT you can create stop orders that will execute during trading resumption. I should have done that because it immediately went up 9 cents before dropping like a stone. I wasn't worried and thought that I would hit my target easily.
Finding halts is not the problem it's being a halt and making the decision what to do upon resumption that I need to work on. Something I do without even thinking about it. Just have to program a response other than my natural reaction because that's where I lose money.
Thank you WaveAtElliot
AH, ok. Yes, you can certainly enter/cancel orders during the halt. The first LULD halt is almost always a gimme. That crowd feeding frenzy! Halt # 2, dunno maybe 60/40 ish for a win? Halt #3... I pushed my luck there once and only once. My biggest single day hose-down in 10+ years of trading :(
R
We shouldn't fear the beast. Just learn how to wrangle it. The biggest losses could become the biggest wins. Just my opinion and why halt trading is very important and difficult.
Yea. I was pressing my luck with halt# 2 but still creating a method where even if I was proven wrong I could get out with a smaller loss would have been better.
:)
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Hey Jonathan hope you don't mind if I comment?
1) Nothing trades during a halt in the real market. You can cancel and create orders but nothing will execute until trading resumes. We can see activity on the L2 book -- these are orders being created and cancelled. The L2 book reflects pending orders not sales. (thus the T&S tape is still during a halt)
Finding halts is easy on the NASDQ : https://www.nasdaqtrader.com/trader.aspx?id=TradeHalts#
R