A.I.M. Users Bulletin Board

[ls7550]

Hi Toofuzzy

I built the calculator to spit out the hold zone ( top part ) so I wouldn't need to do the calculations every month, only when I had an order. I wrote the hi and low trade prices on an index card for all my securities and just needed to check if it was out of the zone and I would have a trade or if close, place a Good Till Cancel order.

I have a laptop startup script into which I enter the next trigger prices for buys and sells (as indicated by the calculator) for each of a range of assets that in the background pulls in the current prices and pops up a message if a asset price is outside of those ranges. Last month for instance BRK was flagging a sell/reduce, more recently UK Midcap is flagging a buy signal. Rather than injecting GTC's as the price nears, I react after the price has been exceeded. A prompt to put on my day trading hat and see if I can achieve a 'price improvement' i.e. actually buy at a higher (sell) or lower (buy) price than I would if I'd placed a GTC at the actual AIM indicated price. Often there's momentum, continuation of the trend that triggered the buy or sell signal, but that does risk missing actually trading a short lived spike (dip). In other cases the price might hit the trigger and then pull back a little and not return to the trigger price level, in which case I might still buy (sell) at that slightly worse price. Overall I suspect it broadly washes. In the case of the recent UK Midcap for instance entering into add/buy trigger territory last week, I've just filled that at a 1.2% lower price than AIM indicated, so after updating the next calculated AIM trade values in that monitor script its back to sleep-mode again. Can go months without any signals as prices remain within their hold-zones. As a backup I keep the Portfolio Control, number of shares ...etc. values also written down on paper, just in case the laptop was lost/stolen/broken. I do run literal AIM figures but only on paper, when it comes to actual trade values I use discretion, not a hard 5% of existing stock value amount, maybe less if I'm doubtful, or more if I'm confident about the price/trend/current situation. AIM as a adviser rather than a director.

The longer into retirement you are, the less time you have - both in life time and in free time (too many other things to be doing). Which does mean I'm a lot less active at reading posts etc. nowadays. For instance I missed a PM from Tom (that I can't reply to in not being a IH member) asking about whether I have a copy of Newport source code, which I don't. I did reverse engineer part of it some years back but only at the binary/assembler level in order to revise the default password. Shame that the source code has been lost as its a great program.

Clive