Due to the change in time between me (hawaii time) and New York (EST) thanks to the wonderful daylight savings time stupidity. (so glad they are finally ditching that), I get to wake up an hour earlier to trade. I do trade the last part of the day, so even with the 6 hour difference in time, I thankfully wake up at a reasonable hour of 6am. (I used to trade the opening of the market and would get up at 3am, that lasted all of 2 weeks! :P)

I was surprised, but half expected some bullish market action since last week was so bearish. This was what I saw when I looked at marketwatch, on my papermoney account. (this shows the exact same info as real, but of course no real money is traded and not everything executes 100% the same)

There was some bearish activity, but bulls were in control led by microsoft and apple.

No matter what marketwatch says, it's the charts that tell the true story..

hourly is showing price coming of a big bear trend, now heading up?

We zoom into the 15-minute and see that the bulls have it..

Next up is the 5-minute and we can see a crossover of the moving averages that signals things should be turning bullish again..

My friend recently asked me to teach him trading, so here I'm gonna show step by step just how I enter my closing order to manage my trade.

Here's the trade I just entered and now we will open an order to close it for us.. if/when it reaches .50 profit, or if it hits our stop. (set at 1X)

*Now, there is a slicker way to do this and the broker will automatically enter a closing trade, when u enter the original trade. BUT, it doesn't always work and trusting the computer to do it for u just takes your eyes off the road for that step.. most likely costing u big time. (it has cost me, but thankfully I caught it in time and only lost a little $$$)

So, here on the monitor tab of the tos platform, we right-click on our trade, (on SPX), then hover the mouse over 'create closing order', then click on 'buy +1 vertical..')

It will open the new order on the trade tab.

about 2/3 down the screen u have to change the 'advanced order' from single order to OCO (one closes other).

After that, u have to make a duplicate order.. by right clicking on an empty green area of the existing order, and then click on creat duplicate order.

Almost done. Now we adjust the prices a bit. The top order is gonna be out target, so decrease that down to .50 less that what credit we received on the trade. (here, we got .60, so minus .50 is .10)

The second part of the order is to close the trade if it goes against us and hits our stop. This price is just double the credit we got.

VERY IMPORTANT: u must change the order type to 'STOPLIMIT' or else it will execute your stop immediately, costing u a small loss AND potential profits!

Finally, click on confirm and send.

This took about 10 minutes to show, but after a few practice runs, it will take seconds to do. :)

and here's how the trade ended up some minutes later..

again, this was a papermoney trade. lasted 45 minutes.