Precisely right. The whole thing is a ridiculous idea, as anyone who has watched ES for even a few weeks will know that news events can set the S&P into a quick gyration and a trading range of many points in a few minutes, and the odds are good that the trade, (or both trades...now that's a really strange idea!) will fill and quickly reverse to a loss.
It does apply the principles of trading breakouts where they work best : smooth trending markets. I wonder if you should size your entry points based on the range of previous after market moves. That way your system can keep pace when there is a regime change in mkt range. Be interesting to see if the Asian open and the European open create spikey periods where you might want to shut down the system.
Is it possible to have an order on IB that would be as follows. (This order could be placed with some other front end.) Es currently at 900 put a buy stop at 902. a sell stop at 898. each one of these orders would have to be bracket type that had a stop and target attached once triggered. If the buy stop was triggered for a long could it cancel the sell stop at 898. and remain open until either stop or target was hit. I usually just use Bt for my bracket trades and have never tried any thing like this with 2 separate stops sitting live on IB. Another consideration is this. Would I even want to cancel the sell stop? There could be days when the buy stop might have been triggered then market falls back and stops out, but than sell stop gets filled and the short now takes + 5
yeah,you can set all that up. Just use OCO (or I think IB calls them OCA) "One Cancels the Other" But better, you should test just going long at 10:30 with a 2 pt stop and a 4 pt target, then a 3 pt stop then a 4 pont stop etc. Then a 5 pt target and a 6 point target etc. Then short at 10:30 same ad naseum infinitum, then random, and don't forget no stops or targets, you gotta test that one too. Then test 11:00 and 11:01, and 13:00, 9:45 on and on. Man, you got a lot of testing to do. Hope you're not paying anybody to test it, cause it'd be cheaper just to trade it.
at any rate Buy stop 902 Sell stop 898 use those as your entry and 4 pt stop then sell 910/ buy 892 OCA But you'll still have a stop open if you hit your target, but heck, if it hits 910 then drops back to 898, that might be a good place to go short anyway. and then you just set up hotkeys "buy last plus 2 stop" "sell last plus 10 limit" etc. then all you have to do is enter you secret OCA code. You sure you want to do this?