Satuki @ Home

 I was actually gloating when the market was edging lower in the AM.  The first 2 shorts I took was MET and ACH. By the noon, I was thinking of a 600 to 800+ day because I had a lot of hopes in the ACH short , which was so close to the  planed target.  Of course, the difference between realized gains and paper gains is huge, as we will see shortly.

So not long after the opening bell, I took a short position in ACH @ 29.23 and it dropped promptly to 28.48.  My planed target was 28.36, which was a 3% move. If it touched 28.36, I would sell it at market.  However, as we can see from the 5 min chart below, it never materialized.   It was very close to my target and I had a 200+ profit on paper.   I ended up exiting it with a tiny gain (27.20). 

Click on the image to have a better view

This trade was similar to the ARO short I took yesterday. But it was worse since the ACH trade was much closer to the planed target than the ARO short.

I believe exits are much harder to handle than entries.   It is easy if a position is taken out by your stop loss.  But when you have a profitable position, it becomes harder.  You can certainly scale out.   That is one way to protect some profits.  You can also use a trailing stop. Speaking of using a trailing stop, I do not know how effective it is on day trading since the margin of a typical day trade is very low.  Once your trailing stop kicks in, a huge chunk of profit is gone.

I do not scale out since I normally set an OCO (order cancel order) for a position and then forget about it.  I try not to watch it since it will not move in my direction no matter how hard I stare at the position. In addition, I can save a lot of energy by ignoring it and look for other possible opportunities.