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Trailing stop is a very useful tool that allows you to make the maximum profit on a position while limiting your losses.  As the stock price goes up, the trailing stop moves a "high water mark" against which any downturn is measured.  When you set a trailing stop, you can set the maximum percentage loss you are willing to take on a position, and the trailing stop function will automatically notify you if that condition is met.

The trailing stop extension that implements this basic functionality is now available at no additional charge for Personal Stock Streamer 7.1 and later.  To download and install this extension, select the Extensions command from the Tools menu, then select Get More Extensions.  Although we have tried to make this extension as efficient as possible, one caveat of installing it on slower machines is that it may noticeably slow down Personal Stock Streamer if you have lots of tickers in your portfolio.

To set a trailing stop alert, select one or more tickers then select the Set Trailing Stop command from the Tools menu.  A window will appear that will ask you to enter the stop percentage and what action to take when the stop is reached.  When you press OK, the trailing stop is set for all of the selected tickers.  The initial "high water mark" for each ticker is set from the higher of the average basis and current price, and is adjusted as necessary when the ticker prices is updated.  If the target loss percentage is reached, an alert is generated with the selected alert action.  To remove a trailing stop alert from a ticker, select the Clear Trailing Stop command from the Tools menu.

The trailing stop extension creates a Trailing Stop column in the Active Securities view that shows the current high water mark and target loss percentage for each ticker where the trailing stop is set.  Although this column is added to the list of columns available in the Active Securities view, it is not displayed automatically so you will need to use the View->Layout->Arrange Columns command to add it to your list of visible columns.

Since the trailing stop extension only implements the basic trailing stop strategy, if you are familiar with VBScript you may wish to modify it to implement more complex strategies according to your needs.  See the Developers section of this site for more information.