Having the right tools to facilitate decent order fills and manageable stop losses within the reality of volatile algo / marker maker controlled market.

    Brokers have putzed along the past decade or so in making tools available to retail customers that help execute in the realities of the market.

    Schwab recently (I am not recommending them), for instance, has developed a nice simple conditional order which I have always wanted to have.

    Instead of chasing directional moves and fakeout breakouts, you can put in multiple conditions to trigger on false breakdowns through prior lows / gaps / trendlines etc

    As an example, First Maj (AG) has been basing / contracting along with a lot of silvers the past month.  I noted three recent days in the middle chart where one could have gotten long within the weekly pattern by buying reversals after a prior low failed then reversed higher.

    The far left chart shows how to set the conditional order.  The example shows how a reversal entry at the gap from a few days ago could be achieved if we go back down. Condition one in this type of entry would be bidding / trading to fill the gap at around 4.70 low.  That triggers a live buy stop order which would be typically back up about 10c at $4.80.  A subsequent stop would have to be put in manually in their system.

    A lot of folks would want to go all the way back through the previous close to get filled.  Some might just use the price with of a 5' or 15' bar, etc.  But I think this type of order is far superior in the you get a much better price location and have a much narrower stop.  I know IB has a form of this , not quite as idiot-proof, and I'm sure Tradestation has language for this.   Haven't checked with Ameritrade, yet.  If you have any useful tools of this nature that you use, I'd love to hear about them. 

    Schwab Conditional Order Example MDR Range Reversal

    Posted by hatefalseweight on 7th of Jan 2015 at 12:43 pm
    Title: Here's a good example of using the automated 2 step conditional order.

    Is this available only on

    Posted by darnelds on 5th of Jan 2015 at 11:31 am

    Is this available only on Schwab's desktop software?  Or also on their website? 

    Thanks for sharing your detailed analysis.

    They've been plodding along trying to integrate options express and build out a better trading platform.  They finally got 3+ legged option spreads available and I noticed there conditional order trade.  This is extremely useful to buy reversals of the usual tapouts before something continues higher like the precious metals have been doing the past week (or vice versa).  Streetsmart edge is a separate platform you'd have to download from their main site. 

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