We got a good discussion going here, so I will keep it going.
One of my rules has been in trading my SR60 chart is, if in doubt as to what to do, go long. Most of the time the market wants to go us and when it does it can be very fast.
For stops I changed a couple of weeks ago and am still using my -.5% stop for shorts, but no stops for longs. I will wait until I get a reversal signal. Like you, I was getting stopped out and then watching the trade make money. Painful.
When I trade and want to set a stop, I have a little excel table set up that I use. If I want a -.5% stop for IWM, I need to know what the equivalent is for UWM and TNA. A -.5% stop for IWM would be equivalent to a -1.5% stop for TNA since is moves at 3x assuming that one has adjusted the number of shares so the investment level was the same. So as you can see from the table below (based on the close numbers from Fri), a 37 tick movement in IWM is the same as a 69 tick movement in TNA. So TNA is actually more forgiving in terms of ticks for the same percent loss, not less as you stated.
IWM UWM/TWM TNA/TZA
74.54 35.35 46.08
1 2 3
0.50% 74.91 35.70 46.77
-0.50% 74.17 35.00 45.39
ticks 37.27 35.35 69.12
I have another table that I use to that tells me how many shares I need to buy for each of the ETF's for different levels of my investment. So if I have say $10,000 it tells how many share I would need of each ETF to invest at 100% and several other different levels.
Shares vs % Assets
NAV 10,000 25% 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200%
IWM 1x+ 74.54 33.5 67.1 100.6 134.2 167.7 201.2 234.8 268.3
UWM 2x+ 35.35 35.4 70.7 106.1 141.4 176.8 212.2 247.5 282.9
TWM 2x- 38.66 32.3 64.7 97.0 129.3 161.7 194.0 226.3 258.7
TNA 3x+ 46.08 18.1 36.2 54.3 72.3 90.4 108.5 126.6 144.7
TZA 3x- 26.85 31.0 62.1 93.1 124.1 155.2 186.2 217.3 248.3
Hope this is not too much, just trying to help.
Jon
