If you follow a methodical way to investing in no load mutual funds/ETFs, as I do, you most certainly will have learned the use of trailing sell stops to either lock in profits or limit any potential losses.
Putting money into the market without them is gambling and not investing. Despite the fact that you can’t place a stop loss with a mutual fund company, you nevertheless need to track it and place the order whenever it gets triggered.
In my practice, I track all sell stops via my custom data base and spreadsheet. It‘s easy for me do, because I spend a lot of time in front of my computer. If you are traveling a lot, this might be more difficult and pose a problem for you.
There is a solution. Some of my newsletter readers have used a couple of services which, for a subscription fee, will track trailing sell stop points for you and send an e-mail to you or your cell phone if any of them have been triggered. While I have not used these companies myself, you might find it worthwhile to check them out.
Here are their web sites with more information:
http://www.tradestops.com
http://www.exitpoint.com
Feel free to send me an e-mail and share your experiences.
Comments 3
Don’t most online brokerage accounts also have that functionality (or a good portion of it) for free?
Some may offer that. If yours does, by all means use it.
Brokers provide stop and trailing stop orders but I have not seen any that provide a trailing stop monitoring alert. These web services simply track your stops and notify you so you can decide what action to take. If, for example, you have a tight stop, and the market bounces around, you may want to raise the stops and monitor them rather than have them executed as stop orders. There are advantages to monitoring stops vs entering a broker stop order. These web services make monitoring stops easy and is part of keeping it simple.