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August 24th, 2005 by eyal | Filed under General rant. |
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Flat day for me, I had more positions on than normal but an appalling win/lose ratio together with several(!) execution mistakes left me with a single digit P&L and my broker a tad richer.
Main lesson of the day: need to tidy up my execution
How: Concentrate and slow down…..
Why: Costing me money
With IB’s TWS, execution is not as easy as pressing the red or green button. It’s a java application with pull downs which I find rather un-intuitive even after over a year of using it and I’m not software challenged. Anyways that’s it for today, with 6 trades today I’ll have plenty to analyze later once I’m done with my day job.
P.S. If anyone knows of an IB TWS plugin or addon that makes execution niftier then give me a shout.
Pull up a booktrader window in tws for the stock you’re trading and it seems to just take the guesswork out of it all. At least it does for me.
Hi Bruce, I can have about 5 to 7 stocks on a page with stop orders for entry and exit so it would be difficult to bring the booktrader up each time to adjust stops, close positions etc. Is that something you usually do?
Thanks for the comment.
Eyal
No, I only trade one or two stocks at a time, and only use market and limit orders. It would seem to me that the booktrader could still be of benefit to you as you can have it set to be armed and then just click on a stock line on the main page and drag to booktrader. Only takes a second. Then just click on the order line you want. To have the booktrader set up to do what you need, just click on configure, then click on booktrader to check off what you need, such as multiple orders, etc. The one thing I don’t know about is the use of stops on the booktrader. I don’t use them, so I don’t know if it is even possible with booktrader. You could have alarms set and then just drag the stock to booktrader and send a market order. Don’t know if that is of help, but I can see where just using the main page gets unwieldy with so many clicks necessary to do what you want.
Hi Bruce, I’ll give that a try. I’m now using the Rapid Order Entry which I totally forgot about.. I disabled it about a year ago as I didn’t need it back then and someone on elitetrader.com just reminded me of it.
Thanks for the advice.