I took a couple losing trades today - small bets, but losses nonetheless.  Here’s one that caused me to take some action.

In the above chart, I was looking for FMCN to break 45.00, so I entered a buy stop limit order for 50.05 with the stop at 50.01.  Well, as you probably know the stop price gets triggered by the ask for buy stops (bid for sell stops) and you can probably guess what happened.  The ask went to 50.01 for a split second (I’m just assuming since I didn’t see it on level 2) and my order was triggered and filled at 50.00.

Of course, the price soon retreated and I was stuck with something I didn’t want.  This has happened to me a couple times before, but this time I decided to do something about it.

CyberTrader has some great alert templates that you can use to set up all types of complex conditions for orders.  If you don’t use CyberTrader now, don’t, I repeat, don’t start using them because you’ll wonder how you ever traded without the Alert Templates once you start. 

I set up an alert template to execute an order when the ask reaches a certain point AND the trade price reaches a certain point.  Once you save the template, you can use it for any stock and you only have to fill in the shares and price levels that you want.  A huge time saver.  Here’s a screenshot of the order I’ll be entering next time around.  I just right click on the FMCN’s chart or level II screen or the entry for FMCN in a trading list and choose my alert template that I called “Buy Stop Limit Order”.

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