VTSO or mental stop order

I still have not gotten around to testing the viability of a VTSO in day trading yet. I feel that the volatility would have me out of trades too often but I like the idea of a safety in case I had to walk away from a trade.

I used VTSO's extensively when applying my CTP plan earlier in the year and found that they were too quirky. One steep day (this was medium term trading) and the VTSO is brought up too tight to the price and an exit was inevitable.

Alternately I can set a stop order as a safety, and just modify the order as needed to follow the price. I do this mentally and execute a market order to close the trade so using a stop will do the exact same thing and give me the security of knowing that I have an order in place should I have a glitch in my platform which makes exiting impossible, it has happened on occasion.

Normally I choose a price to exit based on the quotes, not the actual trading price, and often I will exit a trade immediately upon seeing a certain indication of a turn. This would mean having to cancel the order in place and placing a market order to close. I have had cancel requests take a long time, in the scale of DTing 10 seconds can seem like an eternity and can make the difference of giving up as much as 60 cents per share of gains. This means there is a chance that I cannot place a market order right at the moment that I want it... I will have to experiment and see if this is an issue of more concern than the possibility of getting stuck in a trade. Usually I see these points approaching so cancelling the order ahead of time should not be an issue in most cases...modifying the order might be quicker than cancelling it too.

Testing needs to be done.

Jeff