A.I.M. Users Bulletin Board

[SFSecurity]

Hi Toofuzzy,

Like everything else, I believe that once you pick a method, stick with it. But you may want to use one method for buys and another for selling.

I agree, and additionally document what you are doing so you can evaluate the validity of what you are doing and where there might be problems.

On the dollar versus stock amount issue, so far I am not seeing a significant difference and what difference I see is caused by rounding to whole stock amounts instead of fractional stocks. If you round down you get more dollars and if you round up you get less dollars is what I am seeing but that might just be the ones I'm looking at.

As to using the total of the delayed shares rather than the amount AIM says after deleting the prior virtual trades, my feeling is that it might be riskier to do the larger amount on the buy side, especially if the market is heading down. What may be an apparent rally may be just a kink in the chart of a longer slide down. Looking at charts I see a lot of this, especially if you look at longer term charts. Also this may be a good argument for using the first sell signal after the last buy rather that the first uptick after the last buy signal. The first uptick seems to buy at a lower price than at the first sell and definitely is lower if you have a high sell safe %. It seems like you might have to have a very low sell safe % to avoid buying too high. A 5% minimum stock sale plus a 5% sell safe equals 10% above the floor but it is not real clear to me where the floor actually is. Is it where it seems to be when you still have the virtual buys in place or is it when you have taken the virtual trades off? I haven't played with it enough to know. Perhaps someone else has some insight into this.

As to a delayed trade on the sell side, my instincts are, "Make hay while the sun shines!" Given that we have no clue where prices are going to go, up or down, it makes sense to me that you would sell as much as possible within the limits of AIM's parameters. But then you might miss of of the run up. True, but as they say, a dollar now is worth more than a dollar tomorrow. It's all an, we hope, educated gamble after all is said and done, we just hope that using rules like AIM takes the emotion out of it so we can better align with what the market actually is.

Best to you and yours, now and in the New Year,

Allen