I’ve realized I’d like to setup a stop limit order that’s rolling so I can say,

“sell if the stock gets below 20% of the next high.”

This would allow the limit order to adjust up while the stock is on a run, and then minimize the downside. An example is $ZM. If I could have implemented this approach when I bought it at $89 back in spring 2020, then I would have captured most of the gains when I ran up to it’s all time high.

Being a long term investor, I don’t want to watch stocks closely and manually set a stop limit order. I’d prefer to let them run and hold them for as long as I can, but also minimize the long down run like what $ZM is encountering.

Is there a platform or tool that allows this functionality?

*edited: Thanks to @trendspundit I learned about a “trailing stop limit order”. Here’s what it looks like when I set it up in Thinkorswim app for $RBLX . I set a larger window of -20% market price because $RBLX is more volatile.

It feels good to see some of the losses over the past week return to my portfolio. I own 60 stocks (I’d love feedback on if 60 stocks is excessive). Today this basket is up about +7% after being down -23% over the past two weeks. It’s the biggest single day move I’ve seen for my portfolio since I started investing 6 years ago.

Today’s movement is a reminder to me to stay invested for the long term so don’t miss out on days like this, and also not to react based on fear when everything’s is in the red. I didn’t sell anything over the past month.

I’m also curious if high volatility is going to only amplify as technology enables faster movements of money in markets. Curious if anyone has thoughts about that. Even just 6 years ago swings of +/-2% were the exception. Now they seem the norm.

How well did your portfolio perform in 2020? With a year of unprecedented growth, there was a flood of stock news and historic IPO's to keep track of. Throughout the year, FOMO was a bit of a theme. I passed up $TSLA and $PTON, and sat on the sidelines with $TDOC, $MELI and $SE, to name a few. It's easy to get caught up in what I missed out on instead of celebrating the wins.

Commonstock has also opened my eyes to incredible investors with portfolio performance unlike anything I've seen. Have you seen the leaderboard lately?! It's easy to compare my portfolio to yours, and have envy for the gains I could have had. But this community is not about out-doing anybody else. It's about learning from each other, and like they say on Make Me Smart, "none of us is smarter than all of us." We become better investors through the collective power of sharing our learnings.

Recently, I've been asking myself, "when, if ever, am I content with my portfolio performance?" I've learned from so many of you, and because of that, I've identified ways I could have done better with my portfolio in 2020. Even with my portfolio gaining about 100%, am I satisfied with this? There will always be opportunities many of us will miss out on, but there have also been many risks we have taken and been rewarded for. We each have our own measure of what we determine as "good enough", what is yours?

Today’s a half day for the market, and it got me thing. The market often moves the most pre-market or in the first few hours of the day, so why do we need a full day of trading?

On a normal trading day the market is open from 9:30am-4pm EST. Could the market operate the same if it close at 1pm? This is just a thought experiment.

My guess is it would increase volatility during those hours, and traders would start to use pre/post market trading windows more often.