IBKR - Buy if stock increases over 5% within 2 hours - Order Type?

Investing / Brokers
1

Hey@all.

Maybe simple question, what Order Type in IBKR do I need to set if I want to buy a stock if it increases over 5% within 2 hours. The order should last for a week?

Regards,
Markus

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2

There’s one that logs you out of your account because you shouldn’t be trading like that :smile:

6 Likes
3

Surely someone will answer the practical side…

Some questions out of interest:

How did you develop the strategy?
Is there data supporting it?
Is this a one time thing? If not, how will you select the company/ies you’re applying it to?
Would you ideally want to place a buy order covering any company existing or a selection only?
What’s your selling strategy?

4

Definitely not for Value Investing, I would have used it for things like “GameStop to the Moon” to see if the crowd reacts on trends. Also for FX and Altcoins this could be interesting.

5

See Conditional Orders | Interactive Brokers LLC

Not sure whether you can express “within 2 hours”, but there are examples like “when SPY increases 5%”.

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6

Otherwise you can use the API and write your own algorithms externally.

7

OP should consider what will happen if the price shoots past +5% without stopping

e.g. stock opens +10% vs. prior day close

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8

A good example might be the recent GME mania. When you’re up 400% in 1 hour you’re also up 5% within 2 hours.

9

AFAIK Interactive Brokers offers buy trailing stop orders.

10

Exactly that. I can see similar happenings also if the FED / EZB / SNB decides on interest rate reductions for certain instruments and want to set Buy&Sell orders.

I’ll try the Trailing Stop Orders for that.

11

in the GME type example when a price rises very fast to 400%, there might not be much volume at 5%, so consider the risk your stop order might execute at 400%…

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12

The Trailing-stop algorithm did work quite well today.

Bought GME @26 and sold after the drop to @35

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13

You could use (trailing) stop limit orders. Places a limit order if stop is hit (instead of a market order). Of course, if there is no liquidity, it wont be filled. But that is what we want here.

Additionally, limiting the time-in-force of the resulting limit order would be nice (e.g., instant-or-cancel, 5 minutes), but at least IBKR doesn’t seem to offer that.