Automatic sale as soon as there is any profit

đź’ˇ Feature suggestions & ideas
1

Hi,
I would really like the investment function - automatic sale as soon as there is a profit.

Situation:
I have bought shares of company “A”. I would like to get rid of them, because the company no longer looks lucrative, but I don’t want to lose money, because I’m waiting for the price to increase.
So I would like the automatic sale function as soon as there is at least some profit, so that I can close the position without a loss.

So, for example, a button that would automatically close the position and sell all or the required amount with a profit would be nice. Ideally, with the possibility of tolerance, for example any profit +1%, then sell.

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I know that I can set the automatic sale at my own price, but I have to calculate it laboriously so that it really closes with a profit. Sometimes it happens that I miscalculate and I have a loss, even a small one.

This way I wouldn’t have to do anything like that and would just say - “Sell N shares as soon as there is any profit” or “there will be at least a 1% profit”.

I wouldn’t have to set an alert or open the app to sell. It would just sell itself as soon as there was any profit or maybe % profit on N shares.

Would that be realistic? I haven’t seen anything like that there (I guess).
Thanks

1 Like
2

Sorry if this is a silly question, but are you referring to limit orders?

3

I think he is aware of limit orders but he says calculating 1% profit is too “laborious” and sometimes he miscalculates…

I did have things to say about this whole post but bit my tongue

6 Likes
4

I don’t mean a limit order (I’m talking about those), but creating an order to close the position as soon as it becomes profitable with the option to add, say, +1% or +5% more.

This means in that case not using the price, but only the +% profile. The algorithm would recognize that the order is in profit and from that moment on would calculate whether to automatically sell it or not.

So, for example, I have a loss of $-100. I set “Sell on profile +1%” (like a button). Now it will recognize that I am in profit and add 1% profit and automatically sell all or a certain amount.

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5

Ah ok. So, basically, you just want to be able to set the limit order price by percentage change, rather than setting the desired price itself.

Yes, this would be a good idea. I’d like to see that.

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6

This is a very novice-ey situation to find yourself in. You shouldn’t be holding businesses hoping the share price increases.

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7

Basically. I mean, when I enter such a request, I don’t care about any price. If I have, say, a -$100 loss and I want to sell it for a profit, I would like to “say” that “As soon as there is a 1% profit, sell N shares”. And I don’t want to set the price at which it should be sold anywhere. I don’t care about that. I just want any profit + % extra.

2 Likes
8

Rather common situation. Why should I set X limit orders “what if” when I can set any profit +% extra? And sell for example 20% of the stock at that moment. For me (and not only) very useful.

Some stocks are very volatile, even 20% per day… so why not set it so that I want to automatically sell as soon as I’m, say, 10% in profit with that open position? If I set the exact sale price, it doesn’t have to get there, so I can determine the profit percentage.

1 Like
9

For an aspiring value investor, using limit orders as an automatic selling strategy may indeed be suboptimal. However, as a growth investor, I find limit orders to be a valuable tool for automatically selling when I reach a specific profit target. This approach aligns well with my investment strategy. Currently, I have to calculate these targets manually, so having an automated function for this would be a great improvement to my trading process.

10

Sounds like you’re interrupting compounding unnecessarily.

11

In some countries there’s a 1% tax deduction, so I see where the OP is heading … :wink:

12

i understand what you are saying but not evyone has the same strategy you can look to investors. and if you invests in value stocks like benjamin grahem and warren buffet you don’t need this function. but i invest like george soros en cathie wood in growth stocks withouth dividens. only to gamble if my investment wil go up or down and in this strategy wil this function become an great option.

13

I don’t think anyone should have this. At best manually set a limit order if you have a target price.

Let’s say you buy a stock at 100p a share, set a target of 120p a share to sell. The share price creeps up, then the company releases a really good set of results and the market reacts to that, rocketing the share price to 160p. Do you still want an automatic sell order happening at 120p?

I’ve seen funds that follow an inverse kind of logic that also didn’t work. As the markets trended upwards, they would switch from bonds to equities and set a hurdle rate of the markets fell to convert back to bonds. As a result they missed the market rebounds. Take a look at some of the market peaks / troughs. March 2020 is a good example. Could you logically program when to buy / sell?

14

The question about Trailing-Stop was already here and for some reason it was not planned for investing. That could solve this problem.

The thing is that if I manually set Take-Profit price to 120p and I am already in profit at 100p, it may happen that the price only approaches 120p and goes down again. So if I set the order “Sell as soon as the profitability is 10%”, it could be at 110p and in that case it would be sold automatically.
Of course, it could be smarter with the option to set a daily swing in % or % profit on the invested amount.

1 Like
15

You’d have to set it manually at break-even +X% for each stock anyway.

Waiting for break-even just because you don’t want to make a loss seems a losing strategy to me. But each to their own.

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16

The way I read it, it’s not just about breaking even. But that if you buy a stock with the hope that one percentage increase. Which is what I do with some of my growth stocks. That those are then automatically sold wordy

Currently I do that via a limit order. If I buy growth stock a i hope that the price rises then I place a limit order with that percentage added to the rate.
i

And how I take his idea is to remove that manual formula ( price*1, percentage) and let trading 212 execute it. Personally I would find such a function useful