roneeth said:
Hello Amit! Could you please tell me the Trailing Stop for Mcleod Russel in case if your following....If its not a Trouble. Regards Roneeth
Hi Roneeth...phoenix pulled out a pair of good pieces on saint's thread on trailing stops, from Traderji and saint himself.
I'm adding some additional notes here:
When faced with the issue of setting the stop a distance behind the cmp, the question arises as to how far back.
Obviously it cannot be too tight in normal circumstances, meaning when the trend is going well and the wider market is stable. The tight s/l would knock us out prematurely at the slightest fluctuation in price depriving us of the potential profits.
On the other hand if the stop is set too loose, the danger is it could significantly cut into the profits as we get stopped too late.
As the word 'trailing' implies, the stop now needs to be placed in such a way where it will protect the profits in either direction: not to soon and not too late.
So how far will do?
This is a subjective decision, subject to the anticipated volatility of each individual scrip.
We need to figure out a logical natural volatility or deviation of the scrip in question.
A TA concept, Historic Volatility is made use of here, the calculation of which uses a mathematical formula, and as the explanation of which is complex, I will not attempt it here.
Historic volatility is essentially the standard deviation of closing prices of the scrip over a period of time, the usual recommended time period is the preceding 9 days. Wider the range of closing price, higher the standard deviation and thus higher the historic volatility.
To keep it simple, the figure of 7% is used by many analysts for highly liquid scrips.
Meaning if the cmp is 79, the general trailing stop would be 79 minus 7% =73.45. When the price reaches 150, the trailing stop is 139.50 and so on. Any price movement outside the 7% would knock us out of the trade.
With low liquidity scrips, or where the fluctuation is lower, or in the case of a range-bound, sideways moving price, the value could be lesssay 4%. Here for the above scrip, at 79 the trailing stop would be 75.85 and at 150 it would be 144.
I have written this for a conceptual understanding of a trailing stop only, as situations can change around and not everything can be set to a rigid formula.
Hope it will help understand trailing stops better.