Following the robot a few days later

[Pierre Brodeur]

Let us suppose that I missed the Gold short by the robot when it issued its original signal (which is my case given that I was not a my desk that day) and I wanted to discretionary enter the DUST trade a market price today ($42.87 right now), am I not taking the same risk of a loss than current robot owners? They would stop at the same price as I if I follow the daily robot suggested stop loss should the trade go sour. So my potential loss is known and the same.
On the return side, if this is a trend that is real perhaps the returns are quite high and will be over the 3:1 expectation at the initial date.

I know I am missing something so anybody's help would be appreciated

[lulzasaur]

wouldn't your risk/reward be lower if you entered at a higher price than those who followed the robot but used the same stop?

[Billy]

Let us suppose that I missed the Gold short by the robot when it issued its original signal (which is my case given that I was not a my desk that day) and I wanted to discretionary enter the DUST trade a market price today ($42.87 right now), am I not taking the same risk of a loss than current robot owners? They would stop at the same price as I if I follow the daily robot suggested stop loss should the trade go sour. So my potential loss is known and the same.
On the return side, if this is a trend that is real perhaps the returns are quite high and will be over the 3:1 expectation at the initial date.

I know I am missing something so anybody's help would be appreciated

Pierre, the GDX initial trades are entered at the open price, not at at a 3:1 multi-pivot reward-risk. The initial stop was 7.78% above entry whatever the open price and was trailed down to 56.60 (for entry at 55.96). So the residual worst-case risk for initial buyers is only 1.14%. If you enter –contrarian to what the GDX robot recommends for today – at current market price of 51.81 using the same trailing stop as the initial robot trade, your risk is 9.24% from entry on non-leveraged ETF. The risk is clearly not the same!
Billy