Fixed Stop Loss and Profit Target Strategies for Think or Swim

As promised, here are four strategies showing how to implement fixed stop losses and fixed profit targets for TOS. You need to add these to a chart with some entry strategy. I have included two example entries for you to test out if you want. These are called “Justbuy” and “Justsell”. If there are two green bars in a row, it goes long. If two red bars in a row, it goes short. Otherwise, the targets and stops manage the trade.

You can run a backtest on it to see the results, and play with the stops and targets to see if it improves (or worsens!). To me, this is a good quick way to test if you have any edge in an idea. If there is one, it will show up right away in a simple test. If it takes fancy tools and algorithms to squeeze out a drop of an edge, but you don’t have direct market connections and 8+ figures of capital to employ it, then you are fooling yourself and asking for pain.

These strategies are free. Download “Fixed Stops and Targets.zip” from “Released Thinkscript Strategies” on my Google site. As always, leave a comment if you have any questions or need help setting them up!

Dr. Brett’s Price Targets for Think or Swim

Dr. Brett Steenbarger from Traderfeed recently put up a series of bonus posts covering how he calculates price targets. I made a Thinkscript that plots them for you according to the methodology in his posts. Dr. Brett says the posts are only available for a limited time, so check his links while they are still there.

There are four inputs:
fivedayrange = yes or no. If yes, then it uses a 5 day average value of the daily range. If no, it uses only the prior day’s range.

RS1coefficient = range multiplier for spacing out the R1 and S1 levels.
RS2coefficient = range multiplier for spacing out the R2 and S2 levels.
RS3coefficient = range multiplier for spacing out the R3 and S3 levels.

These coefficients are a multiplier on the range value to use (either prior day or 5 day average as chosen by the first input). Dr. Brett says that these numbers are found by correlating to past data. For ES/SPY, he uses 0.75, 1, and 1.25 for these numbers. The script will plot the pivot, the levels R1-R3 and S1-S3, the VWAP, and the prior day’s high and low.

If there’s enough demand, I could also make an excel backtesting template to get the correlation stats that he uses to tune the targets to the volatility of the particular symbol you are trading.

Download the free script “Dr_Brett_TargetsSTUDY.ts” from “Released Thinkscript Studies” at my Google site.