I’m just reading through threads here and realized that a good number of people open buy and sell positions at the same time to increase the chances of a winning trade. 
(I’m sure I oversimplified it 
but this is something I haven’t really tried. ) Are there any factors that need to be met before doing this? I’ll probably try this out on demo. 
Do you mean buy and sell positions at the same instrument?
Hmm. I think so? Basically, for the same pair, you open both a buy and sell order and whichever one triggers would be the trade you go with?
This is good when you expect a breakout but don’t know in which direction it will take place.
They are known as OCO (One Cancels the Other) orders and you use them if you can spot a breakout about to happen but you do not know the direction. You place one above the breakout and one below the breakout. The first one to get triggered stays and the other one gets cancelled.
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Yeah. But hmm. Would it also double the risks? Is this something that you also personally do for your own trades?
Thanks for that! 
I can make sense of the concept, but I haven’t tried this for my own trading yet.
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You should only do this for breakouts, but sometimes the market reverse pretty fast and you might lose both ways, so I still don’t recommend it.
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Once one stop order gets triggered the other one is cancelled. So no, the risk isn’t doubled. Occasionally I do this when I’m not sure of the direction.
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To be honest I never have had simultaneous long and short positions but I am considering it now.
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It does happen really fast. But, once one of the trades trigger, the other one would automatically cancel so you’d still end up with just one losing trade if ever, right?
Whenever I feel confident about where price will go, it goes against me. That’s why this approach really caught my attention.
Right? I’ve always thought I’d be doubling my risks, but with the OCO concept, it’s really not the case. Although it would probably take much longer cause we’d have to decide where to put the SLs or TPs for each of the positions.
You could try the 15m chart trade after 30 minutes of a new session (Asian, London, NY) has elapsed. Pick the highest candle price and the lowest one, providing there is only a max 50pip limit between the two.
Then aim to put a buy stop at the high price and a sell stop at the low price. Aim to put your T/P at a previous resistance zone. Once triggered, close the other order. Best used on indicies. But you need to be quick fingered as you could trigger both on active price action. .
Best to be demo first. As indicies have a larger starting lot size (0.10?) than the FX pairs.
best of luck.
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Potential risk arises if both orders are triggered at the high and low of your selected range. From that point on your best possible outcome is break-even, if you close both positions at the mid-point of their range: so one is a small winner and the other a small loser, so net zero.
But this is a better potential outcome than with OCO orders, which can only be win or lose.
The danger of running two opposite positions is that you close or are forced to close both before the range mid-point is reached.
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There is an article in pipsology that talks about using this technique during major news releases which would cause a big spike but don’t know which way it will go.
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Bracket trades are best known as a mechanism for trading news but success at doing this is short of evidence.
I intend to simply use a 1-hour intraday range and avoid news announcements.
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if you try to do it around “news”, you can easily be more than doubling your risk, because spreads can suddenly widen so much, and volatility suddenly increase so much, that it’s very easy to have both trades opening, and both closing at much worse prices than you expected - these are exactly the times that (unless you use guaranteed stop-losses) brokers can’t honor your stop-loss
another problem is that one of the two trades can open and automatically close in a split-second, because of the sudden size of the spread, while the other trade is a loser
what Steve suggests, above, is much less dangerous
indeed - exactly
success at doing this also tends to be short-lived: i think everyone i’ve ever known who has done it with some early successes from it has eventually stopped doing it after being taken by surprise by one or two disasters that were far more expensive than they’d imagined possible from their stop-loss positioning
it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that (again, unless you use guaranteed stops) stop-losses don’t always work, and what we’re talking about in this thread are exactly the times that they’re likeliest to fail
i would try this many, many, many times on demo before dreaming of doing it on a real account, Ria (in fact, to be honest, i wouldn’t ever do it at all, myself) - but specifically, don’t imagine just because it seems to work out ok the first 5 or 10 times you try it (if it does), that it’s always going to be safe … it isn’t!
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