jpb Veteran   Posts: 168 Joined: 5/11/2005 Location: Brown Deer, WI  User Profile | Michael1, In looking at your "Trade Plan dumb block" image, you have configured your trade plan to close out your trade with the next analysis cycle. With each analysis cycle, the trade plan will be evaluated and issue the next action. Your Step 1 is to open the trade, buying at market. As soon as that order is filled and the trade plan recognizes there is now a position open that it should manage, it will proceed to Step 2. You don't have a condition set on Step 2 so it will issue a market order to sell the position. I believe this is why you are seeing the trade open one day and close the next -- I'm assuming you run OT between market sessions. To prevent the Trade Plan from closing the position you need to add a condition to the order in the second step -- perhaps a trailing profit stop or Eights Stop or maybe WaveTrader Pivot Stop (if you have the WaveTrader module). You may need to experiment a bit more to find what works for you and what provides a similar return to your original strategy. A word of caution: As you add a stop condition to your order and press save, you may see a red bar appear on the right and left of the TP block. This means that you have selected a stop that "optimized" the strategy instead of keeping it a Mechanical strategy. In fact, if you see the red bars in any of the blocks, it means it is an optimized strategy. Optimized strategies are not suitable for automatic trading -- they will issue orders in the past. Here's an example: I was really excited to find that adding the Next Pivot Point condition to my order produced nice returns. I ran tests in Lab Mode. I ignored the red bars and the missing "Mech" in the list of strategies. I traded it for a month live and was scratching my head as to why orders weren't firing as expected. Angela helped me realize that Next Pivot Point looked back through history to determine NPP -- which is only able to be determined from a historical view with perfect hindsight. I'm not sure what logic is under the Reversing Signals found in the Orders Block, but I'd guess by the name that it would rely on the strategy to say "I'm in a long position but the upstream just said I should be short so let's close the position." As Jim mentioned, to create that logic would require some programming on your part (or hire Jim?) -- probably not an easy task. It may also not work exactly the same as the Orders Block because the Orders Block (as Jim pointed out) has knowledge and access to data upstream that isn't available outside the process. I'll be interested to know if keeping the Orders Block and adding a TP block will work with AutoTrade or if AutoTrade will only pay attention to the Trade Plan block. It would be nice if they both fired exits -- then you just need to move everything else from the OB to the TP except for that one exit. | |
