Saturday, October 2, 2010

Using stop losses


Did you know that almost 90 % of all trading is done by automatic trading which is done by computers using algorithms. Only 10 % of trading is manual. All the big firms like Goldman Sacks have algorithms that have an ability to learn when market changes. They are capable of moving stock or ETF in one direction if they wish, because of the funds that they have. Can you imagine all that power?

I noticed in recent moves in the market, that algorithms tend to push index or stock over resistance to trigger stop losses of short sellers. And this happens all the time. Conditions in market have really changed. Do you remember flash crash? Flash crash is obvious example of electronic trading combined with a lot of funds backing up this algorithms. They can do a lot of damage as you can see from flash crash example. There are also examples of resistance broken only to trigger stop loses and then comes back under resistance. This play back and forth is very frustrating for traders. Maybe the best answer is not to put stop loss just above resistance, because of the poped stops.



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