Re: Stop Limit orders

[Bob Fulks <bfulks@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 12:12 AM 11/8/2004, Alex Matulich wrote:

>If TradeStation's way to do it is hold all your stops on your local
>machine until a tick reaches or passes, it, that's brain-dead in my
>opionon.  If you're a position trader who turns on the computer once
>a day in the evenings after the markets close, what happens then?

TradeStation only holds stop orders on your machine when you turn on 
Automated Trading. With Automated Trading turned off, all orders are sent to 
the brokerage.

I have an automated system that updates a stop on every one-minute bar so 
sending/replacing orders this rapidly would not be feasible.

All limit orders ARE sent to the brokerage even in Automated Trading and 
TradeStation provides a capability to automatically convert limit orders to 
market orders if they are not filled after X seconds (you determine X). I 
tried this on the one-minute system and really got a screenful of orders 
quickly...

There are also several options on how orders are treated. For example, you 
can lock the system performance to the actual fills or simply blast through 
the orders open-loop. If you choose the latter, the account and the system 
may get out of sync. You can resync the account by manually entering an 
order or check for this condition with EasyLanguage functions and create 
code to enter an extra order.

There are a lot of considerations with automated trading and where the stops 
are held is way down on the list. 


Bob Fulks