Exit based on percent of profit

[Roylow3000]

Dozens and dozens of losses after being in the money and I'm ready to throw ToS in the trash if there isn't a more a logical way to lock in profit. How can I create an order strategy to lock in a percentage of profit? For example, if profit is equal or greater than $1,000 then enter an order to lock in 80% or $800 of that. I don't care what the equity cost or the current price, and I'm not trying to do a trailing stop based on a percentage of the stock price itself, but a percentage of my profit. How in the hell is this not a common order type?

 

[Joshua]

You would have to do something like this by going to sell order, order rules, conditional order, method, study, edit, thinkscript editor...
(click the tiny gear icon, to the right of "exchange", on the bottom of screen order entry bar)

def EntryPrice = <manual entry>
plot Result = close <= high - ((High - EntryPrice) * .2);

... and set the conditional trigger to True

Obviously, don't just go and copy and paste this, and submit it as a real order. I would suggest learning more about thinkscript and testing the conditional order system in a paper trade environment.

Edit: you may also want to set some sort of minimum threshold so you don't get wiggled out immediately.

plot Result = close <= high - ((High - EntryPrice) * .2) and high >TypePriceHere;

but this is all up to you, it has to be edited manually, per order.

 

[rad14733]

@Roylow3000 Sorry to hear that you were/are under the weather... There is never a good time for that... I know you seem unwilling but you should try using a trailing stoploss, whether price or percentage based... Your fixation on 80% of highest profit is what keeps getting you beat up rather than at least working with what is available to avoid suffering until you have the exact solution you desire... A hard stop and a trailingstop would lock in at least some profit...

Let's say your entry was around $56.75 on Friday... A hard stoploss at your choice of price would lock in profit or loss... A trailingstoploss of .5% would start out at a maximum loss of ~$426 at entry and that would reduce as price rises... After GM hit $58.60 it would have triggered and exited at ~$58.30... And considering how GM has an ATR of roughly $0.07 and a 2m average bar movement it is highly unlikely you would have been stopped out before hitting the high... And had you used this scenario you would have stopped out at around 84% of potential profit... It's just math... Not hard to scale to your needs...

This link is a good video on setting up trailingstops...

 

[rad14733]

@Joshua It think I referred to that scenario being a viable possibility in one of my earlier posts... It would definitely need to be manually configured and I think I mentioned to set wide and then edit to refine after the entry...