I've been doing day trading for some time now but the problem for me is that I work a day job so I can't be staring at the screen constantly throughout the trading day so I have been looking into strategies where I can day trade with the help of some automation as I usually can only check in on my trades every hour or so.

What I have come up with so far is a strategy where I would identify stocks that seem to have potential for making big moves that day and set buy order entry points with a stop loss not too far below this. However, these are usually at least somewhat volatile stocks so there is a decent chance the stock will cross above this and then back down and hit the stop loss soon after the buy. The strategy I have in mind is that the buy entry point will automatically be set again as soon as the stop loss is triggered.

For example let's say the stock is in a convergence type of pattern but seems to have a lot of potential for a breakout, the top of the convergence seems to be around $50 so I set this as the buy price and I set a stop loss of $49.50. It ends up buying once and then quickly goes back down to hit the stop loss. The system then automatically creates a new trade again with buy of $50 and stop of $49.50. Maybe it hits the buy and stop another time but, later in the day it hits the buy and rockets upward to $56. I check it at least every hour so I eventually see where it is and move the stop loss up to something like $55.

As far as I can tell, there aren't any platforms that provide this functionality to have a trade automatically recreate itself although you can kind of do this in thinkorswim with sequence orders where a stop loss triggers another buy but it is time consuming. I'm a programmer by profession, however, so I have been researching ways to implement this and am working on that.

Certainly this is no get rich quick strategy and requires a lot of work in properly placing the buy and stop loss points and picking the right stocks to trade but I think it has potential. I'm curious of what others think of this though.

Because your trading stocks and not futures, Trade station is probably your best best to create something partly or completely automated to assist you. I haven't used Trade station in over 10 years but I know a lot of people here still use it. If you were real advanced in coding you could use Ninjatrader with Interactive Brokers but last time I checked, with equities they still charge a commissions using the Ninja platform. Tradestation would be my choice if I had to choose.

Anyhow good luck
Quantismo