|
A trailing stop is the name used to describe the action of moving your stop closer to the current price as the market moves in your favor. Lets say you open a long position in the FTSE and you place a sell stop 10 points below your entry price. The market starts to rise and when you are in profit by 15 points you move your stop to 10 points below the current price, to ensure a 5 point gain should the market reverse. You continue to adjust your stop so that it is always 10 points below the current price, but you never lower your stop. This way every time you move your stop you are locking in a greater profit. Eventually the market will reverse and your stop will be hit taking you out of the position with a profit. Action: Use Market Master to familiarize yourself with different orders. 24 Chapter 5: The Direct Access Platform The following pictures are from a particular DA trading platform. Figure 1 In figure 1, above, is a screenshot of the trading platform, giving a fairly complete picture of its functionality. At the top you can see the markets that the platform is currently accessing, The E-Mini S&P and the E-Mini Nasdaq100. Under the working orders tab, you can see the orders that are waiting to be executed. The two extra windows show the market depth (on left) and the order ticket (on right). 25 Figure 2 In figure 2, is a detail showing the market data and the working orders. The markets (top two grey lines) are the FTSE100 future, represented by the letter Z, and the Long GILT future, represented by the letter R. You can just make out the price data, which includes the bid quantity, the bid price, the last traded price, the offer price, the offer quantity, the last trade volume and the total volume. To trade you click on a price or on the volume, or on the buy and sell buttons on the left. Any of these actions bring up the order window, shown below. |
|
