If you have just completed PTS and are starting your trading plan and you have no idea where to start here's a tip.
Risk Management: To me this is the most important part of your trading plan. Makes sense right, if you don't know the proper amounts of money to risk how can you possibly stay in business very long. I've found that most people without a plan risk far too much on each trade they take. There are many ways you can manage a trade, bar-by-bar, pivots, shooting for a certain risk amount. How do you determine what's best for you? Well first off it's important your management fit your emotional balance. If you are a jittery trader and get that burn in your stomach when you see the first one minute pullback you might want to do something simple and shoot for 1 or 1.5R targets. Others might want to hold for 3 or 4R if sitting through the inevitable pullback doesn't bother them. Still other may be able to hold on for awhile but get off balance on deep pullbacks. In that case moving to break even sometime along the way would benefit them. It all comes down to what happens to you emotionally once you push that buy or short button. I'm the third case, I shoot for 2R targets and move to BE once it's gone 1R. I know in the long run using 2R AON would net me more money but I would be set off balance the times the trade went 1.9R and then got a full stop out. That would leave me in a state where stupid things start to happen. It took my 1.5-2 years to figure it out, but once I did there has been no looking back.
If you trade multiple strategies you can have different managements for each strategy that you trade. My management for swing trades is different from my intra-day trades. I do this because I am watching my intra-day trades more closely. I am seeing every pullback in real time so my emotions come much more into focus. With swing trades I enter them and put my OCO order in with a GTC (good till cancelled) order type. Once that is done I check them each morning or evening. I rarely look at them during the day. I don't want the market to influence me out of them.
When you start out keep your risk small. Even if you are well capitalized start small with something like $10 or $25 per trade. At these low levels I think it's OK to increase you risk after 3 profitable months. If you increase and run into problem you can decrease back to a comfortable level.
I've written a lot about both risk management and psychology. So much so you might think they are the same thing. You wouldn't be far off!
For more information on trading plans:
https://newtradersupportnetwork.locals.com/post/270588/the-dreaded-trading-plan
2 trades for me today with +1.5R total
1st Trade QCOM +2R
148.39/149.97 exit 143.25
12% gap down under pivot support and 50ma after a strong daily double top rejection,. I took it on a congestion breakdown with a fairly wide stop, leaving my 2R target 50c over its ATR, slow but consistent move down with great RW, hit my target on the penny before it bounced.
2nd Trade AQB -0.5R
9.40/9.70 exit 9.56
I rarely trade stocks under $10 and even more rarely short them. I liked this daily chart as it broke its uptrend channel and stayed under a strong 9.50 support line enough room to its daily 50ma. I entered after a pullback with a fairly wide stop but only 1/3 of its ATR used at the time. It failed to break down with the strong market open and stayed in a narrow range.
I actually broke my plan with this trade as I lowered my stop to a pivot where price made a big bounce earlier at 11am with a large seller sitting there. My thought was that if it breaks that level again then it will likely...
1 trade for (-1R)
I took a BD on QCOM. I was worried about the target being close to the daily range, so I took a tighter stop on the 2 min chart. I am looking through PTS right now, most of the examples have 2 options for where to put your stop. It looks to me like one of the stops would be at the bottom of the main consolidation area, and the other at the bottom of where there has been a shakeout or turnaround bar (if there has been one). Due to the daily range I took the tighter one on this. In hindsight it seems obvious to take the wider stop, but in the moment it looked ok.
I was then looking at the 15 min 3BP on QCOM, but the reason I used a tighter stop in the first place was because of the range. The 15 min 3BP would have needed to have gone even further than the wider stop on the 2 min BD, so I didn't take it.
