I am using a strategy that finds an expected breakout and places a trailing stop close to the current price, currently set at 2 points below. That is, my order placement is currently;
1
2
BUYsizeCONTRACTSATMARKET
SET STOPpTRAILING2
However, when running this, it sometimes (emphasis on sometimes, it doesn’t always do this) gives me an error saying “You attempted to place a stop at a smaller distance than the minimum required by the broker” (or words to that effect).
Is there a way to set a stop at the minimum distance required by the broker, or will I have to simply restart the strategy every time this happens?
Thanks @GraHal, that’s a super useful spreadsheet and I’m wondering how I ever got by without it!
As for the stop distance, the whole point of the strategy is that it catches losers very quickly and runs with winners, so setting a stop to be >10 points away would ruin its effectiveness – very small stop sizes are far preferable in this case. Is there a known way to find the minimum stop distance and set the stop equal to it? Perhaps through the use of error handling? Or would I have to go to more advanced software to handle that sort of thing?