Setting Alarms For Fun and ProfitOne of the most attractive things about being a trader is that once you become proficient with your trading system you don't have to spend all day in front of your computer like an extra in the Walking Dead. There's a lot more to life than trading. The goal is that once we have developed that skill, we can “trade to live” and not “live to trade.”
I like to teach that trading is like fishing - Your job is to go into the water, cast a few lines, and wait for the fish to come and snag a hook. The keyword there is wait . Once you set your lines, you don't have to babysit them: go do something else. (We trade to live, after all!)
Likewise, with trading, once you have developed a certain level of skill in "setting your lines", you should only need to spend about 30-60 minutes in front of your computer "working". Then you simply need to wait until the trade, that is price, gets snagged onto your hook. In the meantime, go do whatever it is in life that you enjoy doing.
How do fishermen then know when a fish has taken the bait? Some fishermen attach a small bell on the end of their pole, a “fishing buddy”, and as the fish jerks the line the bell alerts the fisherman that “he’s got a live one!”
How is is that Alarms can instantly become your "fishing buddy?" Let us count the ways:
First: Management of Buying Power
Let's say you have a $10,000 trading account. You wake up, do your morning routine, head to your home office (or the kitchen table) and “go fishing” in the Futures markets. You find three great opportunities for Soybeans, Oil, and Copper. The margin requirements for each of them (per contract) is $4,500, $5,800, and $7,300, respectively.
Futures trading requires that you have a certain amount of capital in your account per trade setup, known as the margin, or buying power, at the time you setup your trade. This "margin" is set aside in your account and can't be used, even if the trade hasn't been triggered or entered. If you wanted to setup all three of those trades before you headed to work you would need $17,600 in your account. But you only have $10,000. What do you do?
In the past, when I ran into this situation, I would have to guess (or hope) I would choose the correct trade to place before I left for work, and send just that one trade to my broker. Inevitably, I would choose the one losing trade, or the one that didn't get hit , and it ended up that one or more of the other trades turned out to be winners - the trades I did not take - all because I couldn't put on all three at the same time. Aaargh!!! Every day I felt like the trading gods were against me!
Here's where alarms can become your best friend.
Let's say at any given moment if you received an alarm, you would be able to respond to that alarm within an hour. You could setup an alert line 1/24th the daily ATR away from your entry price. For example, at the time I am writing this, the Daily ATR for Crude Oil is 1.7708 - the average distance or range that Oil trades in a day. Divide that by 24 and on average, oil moves about .0738 per hour.
If you are looking to go long oil at $73, you would draw a horizontal line at 73.0738, and set an alert on the line, giving you about an hour to check that the trade is still valid. When price activates your alert, you can log into your trading platform, verify that you still want to take the trade, right-click the long-short tool (which you had setup beforehand) and send the trade to your broker, whereby then and only then will the $5,800 be allocated from your Buying Power.
It is unlikely that all three trades will hit at the same time so this gives you the "buffer time" needed to efficiently manage the available capital in your account to take as many trades as possible.
Using alerts in this manner can help you minimize the number of missed opportunities you might experience because of the limited amount of buying power you may have.
Second: Trade Opportunity Alerts
In the futures market, I have what I call my "31 Flavors" - the 31 Futures contracts that I actively trade. On any given morning I might find 5 assets where I’m looking for a long opportunity, another 5 assets that I’m looking for a short, and the rest aren’t in any trend or environment where I’m looking to trade.
Many indicators let you set an alarm when a certain condition occurs. For instance, I can set an alarm on the ten high-probability assets I have flagged to let me know “Hey, Captain: a Sabre Long opportunity just formed on the S&P;”, or “Hey Captain, a short opportunity with the pattern you are looking for just popped up on Crude Oil.”
Likewise, if you are following a Moving Average strategy, you can setup an alarm saying “Hey, Trader: XYZ just crossed the 89 Moving Average” or "ABC just crossed the 40 day Moving Average.
At the time of this writing TradingView will let you setup up to 400 of these alerts. (P.S. - If you need more than 400 alerts, you're probably overtrading... just sayin') :-)
When the alert is triggered you can just take a few minutes out of your day outside of your normal trading hours to check in and see if that mid-day opportunity is worth setting up. After a couple minutes, you can get back to what it was you were doing.
The myth of the day trader who is glued to his or her computer all day in fear of missing an opportunity is just that - a myth, because alerts free you up to do what is important. Remember, we are trading to live - we aren't living to trade.
Finally: Trade Management
Let's say you are a swing trader. Trades you enter may take anywhere from 3 to 30 days to hit their target. Say, however, you have a hard and fast rule to take 3R profit from all of your trades because you would rather take 3R any day rather than see price go to 5R, or 7R, just to have it come on back and stop you out for a loss due to emotions or lack of paying attention, because, yes, you trade to live - you're not tethered to your computer or smartphone all day. You've got better things to do. (At least I hope you do!)
You can setup an alarm to let you know that a trade you have running achieves 3R of profit, whereby you can then move your stop, then check in on it each morning and/or evening to see how you may want to lock in more profit or call it a day and cash in on your winning trade.
Conclusion:
In short: Use alarms to make your trading more efficient, more effective, and ultimately, more profitable.
Are there any other ways that you use alarms to maximize your trading game? Let us know in the comments... I'm sure we are all, myself included, dramatically under-utilize this very powerful trading tool.
Trade well, everybody!
