[pcabc]

How are people opening positions?

My experience.

Buy stop limit orders, as suggested in the book, are not available on most non-leveraged accounts in the UK.  Further, for the short time I had them available they tied up cash which meant I could only place a limited number of orders in the hope that one might trigger as required.  Unless the market is exceptionally strong this was highly optimistic, I could wait for ages whilst watching good breakouts from other stocks.  So buy stop limit orders are out of the picture.

Stocks often gap up or break out on the open.  So more often than not, on the open the stock moves above what I would consider a sensible price compared to the breakout level.  My strategy therefore is to put in a buy limit order to snag the stock if it pulls back to what I consider an acceptable level intraday.  But very strong stocks don't pull back significantly, or at all.  So these escape me.  I could put in an order at a higher level, but then I could be, say in at 5% above the breakout price.  This means if it goes sideways or pulls back a little I'm instantly down, I have more risk because I'm higher than my stop loss.  This distance from my stop loss is also bad as it conditions me to buy too far above the breakout and stop loss.

What do other people do?

I'm wondering if I'm missing something?  Is there some other plan to get in at a good price?  I can't simply sit in front my PC all day and manually scan (or even automatically scan) prices, and in any case gaps and rapid increases in price mean that this is not viable.  If its an A+ pick and market breadth is very strong I could just try to get in at any price - but I think that would bite me.

Thoughts?