Questrade and the lack of VTSO

This is an update to the VTSO situation as I realized what was going on this week, mid April.

I found out that the TSX does not support Stop Loss orders other than stop limit orders. Stop loss become market orders upon being triggered. A VTSO is basically a moving stop loss order and therefore I believe that the VTSO and stop loss order are unavailable to all TSX and TSX Venture trades. This has nothing to do with Questrade as this will be the same for all brokers unless they institute some method of providing a stop loss through their own systems.

My fix is to trade the NYSE and AMEX using similar issues. I tested the stop loss and VTSO and they are still available over there. So any that really want to use these features will have to go outside of Canadian markets to do so.

Due to my difficulties with my platform and connection this morning I had opportunity to ask about the VTSO or Virtual Trailing Stop Order.

I won't get into the technicals as far as how these work, that is in my index if you need to check it out.

Questrade has not allowed VTSOs for about three weeks now due to some difficulties with executions and the trading platform. I did not ask about a re-instatement timeline but I will do some followup on this as I am curious.

I used to use VTSOs for exits while I was playing with a medium term strategy a while back and they did not do me any favours, nothing against the executions, they worked fine. It was just the fact that a trailing margin is tough to pick for a low volatility stock let alone for what we are experiencing now. Even manual chart stops, my favorite, would be getting nailed left right and center so I have not used any stops in some time.

In daytrading stops are not as necessary but are still prudent. Today was a case in point. Had I placed stop order I would have been protected had the trade go against me and it would at least serve as a safety or stop loss protection. As it turns out I could not have placed the stop anyway...although the market order did get executed so perhaps a stop might have gone through had I tried.

For the record, i was going to place a 15 cent trailing stop on my HGU position today had I been able to.

I am going to guess that Questrade needs to ramp up their platform and throughput to accommodate the higher volume of traders that they are no doubt seeing of late.

On a sidenote:

They are having a chart tracking issue which is to be resolved by Friday, perhaps the VTSO might be rectified as well. Apparently they were not aware of the chart issue until I pointed it out yesterday. I might suppose that it only appears to affect certain index data and I may be one of the few who might be using the platform in this manner as I use the index to base my trading on primarily.

Should anyone have the case when opening a chart after the market is open it does not display any past intraday history. As long as the chart remains open it tracks fine, just don't close the chart or the platform while trading...it screws up the moving averages.

Jeff.