Exits in profit

[gdodds]

Hi David,

I would like to test a system which exits on a trailing stop ONLY if the close is greater than the initial buy price.

I have coded this in MetaStock however it is messy and does not handle pyramid trades correctly.

Could a new function be added to the DLL say "TradeSim.EnableProfitOnlyExits" which would only exit a trade if the exit trigger fires and the trade is in profit or the protective stop is hit ?

Alternatively a function which returns the entry price for the current trade say "TradeSim.EntryPrice" would enable this functionality to be coded into the exit trigger from withing the MS exploration.

Thanks
Geoff

[David Samborsky]

As you said it can get very messy.

Using a trailing stop can pretty much achieve what you want to do.

[gdodds]

Hi David,

Unfortunately a trailing stop does not do what I want to do as the share price can fall through a trailing stop before the trade is profitable.

I don't want to exit if this occurs, I want to stay in the trade until either the protective stop is hit or the trade goes into profit and the trailing stop is activated.

This type of strategy is refered to as "No Mans Land" ie. the band between your buy price and the fixed stop is No Mans Land and you should not exit in this band.

There are several mentions of No Mans Land in the forum however no suitable solution has been suggested. I have contacted another user who wanted to use this strategy and they suggested using WealthLab !!

This method of exit is taught by a national training company. One of the company instructors tells me that the only way to test a system using tradesim is to export the trades DB and manually trade all trades that had a normal exit resulting in a loss.

It might sound trivial however I have done this and found the difference between the results for my system was 40% profit instead of 20% loss initially reported by tradesim !!

Surely this is an easy function to add to the Metastock DLL

Geoff

[David Samborsky]

So if the protective stop is hit then you only exit the trade if the exit price yields a profit relative to the entry price ? Please clarify ??

[gdodds]

Always exit on protective stop.

Only exit on trailing stop if in profit. I have an example graph I will email to you (don't think I can attach to a forum post ?)