8. The Decision Room
The Decision Room is a beta feature. It is still under development, and parts of it may change.
A stop-loss is a price at which you intend to sell a position: to limit a loss if the trade goes against you, or to keep part of a gain once it has come. Many investors decide it in advance, while they are calm, since a decision made earlier is easier to keep in the moment a price is falling.
In Tradestory, the main way to set stop-losses is through your strategy. You write the rules that work out a stop for each position, and Tradestory applies them to every position the strategy covers. That stop appears as Strat SL, and we build such rules in Chapter 10.
Sometimes you want a different stop for one position than your rules give it. You may know something about the stock that your rules do not, or the price may have behaved in a way that calls for a closer look. For that, you can set a stop-loss of your own, shown as My SL. Your own stop is checked first, ahead of your strategy's rules: if the price falls to it, the position is marked Sell, with the reason Your stop loss.
There are two places to set it:
- straight on the Dashboard, by typing the price into the position's My SL cell, as we saw in section 4.4,
- or in the Decision Room, which puts the price history and the numbers that bear on the decision in front of you before you choose.
In this chapter, we look at the Decision Room: the positions it brings to your attention, the idea of support that its tools are built around, and how to use those tools to arrive at a price.
Let's start with the queue.