Has the following ever happened to you? You get a signal from your trading system – it’s go to long/buy. Now, you quickly have to place a trade. Fumbling, you click the wrong order type or put too much risk on the trade. If you cancel your orders and resumbit them, that means “back of the line” and you may not get filled. If only there was a way to reduce the headache and streamline the placement of orders!

…Well, in NinjaTrader 8, this is possible. We are big fans of the ATM Strategy feature in Ninja’s trading platform. The above video covers just about everything you’d want to know about how to configure an ATM Strategy. Of course, the video does not go into detail about what profit target and stop loss values you should use. That’s going to be up to you because you may be using a different method than the next person and so on. Therefore, it may behoove you to set up ATM Strategies pertinent to common scenarios you find yourself in.

With day trading systems, it is common to go for a certain amount of ticks or points. If your trading system is based on price action, you may use a dynamic (changing) value for the profit target and stop loss. That’s what they teach over at DayTradeToWin.com. As such, consider what your trading coach or course says. Configure the most common profit targets and stop losses according to the instructions.

If you prefer NinjaTrader 8’s Chart Trader rather than a SuperDOM, you can select preconfigured ATM Strategies from the same style of drop-down. Remember, to configure them, select Custom, which will bring up the configuration area. It’s also important to using a naming scheme that alphabetizes the various ATM Strategies. For example, “P4S8” describes to your mind a profit target of four ticks and a stop loss of eight ticks. A variation could be “P6S10” and son on. Get it?

So, hopefully we resolved some of your nervousness when placing trades. How does Benjamin Franklin’s expression go? ““An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Successful trading is as much about risk management as it is finding winners – and sometimes, even more!