What is the meaning of “Closed Short” ,“Opened Long” ,“Scaled Out” and “Scaled In”?
Opened Long - is when you open a long position. Long means that you buy to open the position, so you are trying to profit as the price rises. So if you were closing a long position you would sell it. Closed Short - is when you close out a short position. Short means that you sell to open and buy back to close. With a short position you are trying to profit as the price falls. Scaled Out - means you get out of a position in increments as the price climbs (for long positions). Scaled In - means you set a target price and then invest in increments as the stock falls below that price (for long positions).
"Okay, so...  &gt; Lifting* the offer (hit bids, lift offers). And I suppose that's a stategy, albeit a somewhat simple one. Passive routing strategies differ from firm to firm and algo to algo. What is your customer going to think if you bid up a new price level only for the stock to rally completely away from it?  I mean if you have an open order for more than 10 times the amount currently offered with a limit above the offer, and you havent gotten filled on the bid, what can you do but lift the offer and try to be first at the next price level up? At least you would have gotten some at the price they quoted, or are they fill or kill?  &gt; ""Bidding it up to attract sellers"" sounds an awful lot like spoofing, just a heads up. Sure though, if you want to tighten a spread or create new levels with aggressive passive liquidity, that is a strategy. The same caveats as I mentioned above apply.  Just to be clear, 'aggressively adding passive liquidity' is the more apt way to put it - I'm talking about when you actually want to get filled on those bids but you're having trouble finding sellers.  Could you give me an example of what you might consider passive or aggressive, just for scale - would a mkt impact of .10% raise any eyebrows? How do you gauge fair value or does that matter less to you than just accumulating/selling what you can for what you were asked to?  &gt; Anyway, if market impact isn't an issue for the customer, sure, take liquidity until you're filled. Don't forget about getting good size done in the opening and closing auctions (MOO/MOC). If you're too passive you risk the market moving away from you and pissing off the customer. If you're too aggressive you risk moving the market too much and pissing off the customer.  So then is the question more 'how motivated is the buyer or seller?'  I'm glad you bring up the MOO/MOC, are there certain securities that don't have much of a market in those auctions?  Trying to suss out how a large firm can hold a position in some of the less popular names with next to no liquidity and little in the way of dark pool, auction, block sales, etc." Depending on the state you live in paying interest on a mortgage opens up other tax deduction options: Real estate taxes, Car tax, donations. See schedule A http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f1040sa.pdf The shocking bottom line is that it never works to your advantage in the short term. Owning your house: But there are big risks, ask anybody stuck with a house they can't sell. But it doesn't scale. You spend 10K more to save 2.5K in taxes. Buy because you want to, not to reduce taxes. "With stocks, you can buy or sell. If you sell first, that's called 'shorting.' As in ""I think linkedin is too high, I'm going to short it."" With options, the terminology is different, the normal process is to buy to open/sell to close, but if you were shorting the option itself, you would first sell to open, i.e you are selling a position to start it, effectively selling it short. Eventually, you may close it out, by buying to close.  Options trading is not for the amateur. If you plan to trade, study first and be very cautious." When using the Stochastic Indicator your basic aim is to buy (go long) when the stochastic becomes oversold (goes below 20%) and then the %K line crosses above the %D line at a market low, and to sell (go short) when the stochastic becomes overbought (goes above 80%) and then the %K line crosses below the %D line at a market high. Other indicators or candlestick patters can also be used to further confirm the trade. Below is a chart of a trade I recently took on GUD.AX using the Slow Stochastic in combination with support and resistance levels as well as a candlestick pattern.  When I conducted my stock search on the evening of 28th July 2015, GUD was one of the results from the search that I particularly liked. The Slow Stochastic had just made a crossover in the oversold area just as the price was bouncing off its recent lows at the support line. But what I really like about this opportunity was that there was also a bullish reversal candle (a Hammer) at this short term market bottom. The high for the day was $8.34, so I placed a stop buy order to buy the stock tomorrow if the price opened or moved above this high of today. So I would only buy if the stock hit or moved above $8.35 during the next days trading. So if the stock opened and stayed below the previous day's high I would not buy the stock and my order would be canceled at the end of the day. This is very important because it stops you from getting into trades that don't go in the direction you want. If this happens then you could check the chart again after market close to see if it is still worthwhile to place a new order for the next day. On the 29th July 2015 the stock did open higher at $8.42 (which is where my order got executed) and closed at $8.46. So I ended up buying slightly above my target price but it did move higher on the day, so a successful entry overall. I had placed my initial stop loss at $8.09 (just below the low of the previous day of $8.10). If the trade had gone against me in the following days the most I would have lost was 1% of my total account capital. My target for this trade was $9.86 (just below the resistance line near $10), which would represent a 5% gain against my total account capital (or approx. 16.7% gain on the trade). So my win to loss ratio was 5:1. As you can see from the chart, the next day gapped up at the open and prices continued moving up strongly during the day. The next day was a slightly negative day, and then a few days later, on the 5th August 2015 my target price of $9.86 was reached (with a high of $9.88 for that day), so my order was closed for a total profit of 16.7% on the face value of the trade. However, as I bought on margin (using CFDs) my actual profit on the initial margin I had invested was 167%. My total time in the trade was 7 days, and I spent about an hour in the evening doing my searches and placing my orders, then less than 10 minutes managing the trade each evening after market close. The stock did go up a bit further after my profit target was reached, but the day after that the price started to fall as the price hit the resistance line and the Slow Stochastic did a crossover in the overbought area. Overall, this was a very ideal trade and I was very happy with it. Not all my trades reach my profit targets and I may get stopped out at a smaller profit or I might make a small loss (as I move my stops up as the price moves up). The key to successful trading over the long term is to keep you losses small and let your profits run (with my longer term trend trading I don't have profit targets and let my profits run until I get stopped out, but with my shorter term trading I do use a profit target usually 5 or 6 times the size of my initial stop). If you have an average win to average loss ratio of 3:1 or higher and have a success rate of 50% winners you will make money over the long term. THANK YOU so much! That is exactly what I was looking for.  Unfortunately I'm goign to be really busy for 7 days but I'd love to tear through some of this material and ask you some questions if you don't mind.  What do you do for a living now? Still in real estate? Did you go toward the brokerage side or are you still consulting?  What's the atmosphere/day-to-day like? "Disney - Verb, the act of buying a large market share or company with the intent of mass producing its goods and services for maximum profit.  ""Thank goodness EA disneyed DraftKings. Now I can place bets on my Madden teams!"" ^/s, ^please ^don't ^sue ^me ^Disney." "You need to interpret ""security"" appropriately in Wikipedia's definition.  You should think of it as saying: to be long in a put, means the holder of the position owns the put   and will profit if the price of the put goes up And what makes the price of the put go up?  -- the price of the underlying stock going down." Just because your slice of pie gets bigger doesn't necessarily mean someone else's becomes smaller. In a lot of cases it's the entire pie that gets bigger. Why is the pie bigger? More investors (savers turn investors; foreign investments, etc.), more money printed (QE anyone?), Market sentiment changes (stock is priced by perceptions) And it can certainly get smaller.