Tag Archives: Developing

Developing Your Trading Strategy – Timing of Entry

When defining the requirements for your trading strategy, and you are specifying the timing of your entry, traders like to use terms like set-ups, triggers and conditions. Set-ups are your reasons for looking at a potential trade. For example, where a price has been hitting a resistance level for the last few days and looks like breaking through, this might be regarded as a set-up. Another example might be the observation that the price is forming an ascending triangle or a double top, or any chart pattern. Such set-ups may encourage you to place a company on your watch list and wait for confirmation that the share price has broken out of the triangle or that the double top has actually occurred. Set-ups are normally a series of events observed on a chart over an extended period of time. In contrast, a trigger will, more than likely, be a single event that generates a buy signal for you. Examples include break-outs, significant candlesticks, or indicators crossing through relevant reference lines. Conditions are another part of your entry decision. Your conditions will normally be trend-based, because you want to trade with the trend. You may get several triggers when looking at a particular company, however, a trigger is not valid unless it is accompanied by an underlying condition. You might stipulate, for example, that a share price must be trading above its 30-day simple moving average and must have been doing so for at least the last five trading days, before you

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