When opening a new position, you have several position sizing choices. You can define position size by:
Contract quantity
Dollar amount
Percentage of a bot’s allocation or available capital
Linking the contract size to another position
You can easily manage position sizing with fixed contract limits in open position actions.
Using a fixed contract size enables you to specify the exact number of contracts you want the bot to open.
The bot will reference the fixed contract limit every time it sends an order to your broker to open a new position.
For example, if you set the contract amount to five, the bot will always open five contracts per position in that scanner automation.
Plus, if you have two or more open position actions in an automation, each position type could open different contract amounts. So, you have a lot of flexibility!
You can always change the open position action’s settings or use custom inputs for more efficiency and flexibility.
Remember, a bot will automatically stop sending orders to your broker if it exceeds an allocation or position limit.
Transcript
In this video, I want to show you how to set fixed contract limits to your open position actions. That way, you can help manage your position sizing exactly how you want inside of your bots.
Now, using fixed contract limits is just one of the ways in which you can specify how many contracts or what quantity of contracts you can submit when you send orders to your broker. Inside of our CCI swing with spread scanner here, you'll notice that we go through a number of different decisions looking for swing trading opportunities.
Ultimately we get to two open position actions. One open position action on the left-hand side which is to open a short call spread, and another open position action that the bot could go to to open a short put spread. The bot has the opportunity to open either a short call spread or a short put spread.
Now, inside of each of these open position actions, we can specify the amount that we want traded when the order goes over to our broker. And notice that one of the selections we can choose from here is to specify a fixed contract amount. This would be very specific that we want it to trade exactly a number of contracts or spreads for this particular order type.
We can set it to something like five contracts which would ensure that every time they got to this point to open a new position, it would submit an order to trade exactly five contracts. So if we were good with that for a short call spread, we can go ahead and save.
For our short put spread, we might want to do something slightly different. Maybe for our short put spread, we might be willing to trade more contracts for this particular strategy, or maybe it has a higher probability of success or further out-of-the-money. Whatever the case is for us, we can set the fixed contract limit here and change it to something more reasonable like seven contracts, or we can change it to something like twelve contracts.
Whatever we want to set here is exactly what will be used when you submit the order to your broker inside of the bots. So be careful and just use exactly what you feel comfortable with to manage your position size. Again, this is just for the orders that go over that would potentially open and fill trades. So you want to be careful with the contracts that you select to ensure you have enough capital available.
Again, the bots will always stop orders from going through to your broker if it starts to breach its daily position limits or total position limits, or the capital that you've allocated for new positions. So once you're good to go with your new contracts, you simply can hit save and then save the open position action to your automation.
So this is a really simple and easy way to, again, set fixed contract limits specifically for every type of open position action that you have inside of your automations. And this really helps with intelligent automated position size management.
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