Strategies

Know your tools to be an effective trader

StockHero allows users to trade in both bull and bear markets with long and short strategies. Bots supports both directions but each bot is configured to be in one. To trade both directions with the same settings another bot must be used. You may make a copy of a bot and change the strategy to trade an asset in both directions.

What is a Long strategy

Buying a stock with the native currency (USD for example) expecting that the value of the stock will rise. A profit is made when you sell the stock that has appreciated in price.

What is a Short strategy?

Selling a stock in anticipation that the price will drop in the future. A profit is made when you buy back the same stock at a lower price.

Borrowed-Shorts

StockHero allows you to do borrowed-shorts as well. This means that you can sell (short) a stock without having to own it. The ability to short a stock depends on your broker's list of stocks that you can short. In order to execute a "borrowed-shorts" strategy, you need to connect StockHero to an exchange with the "(Margin)" text appended to it in the Brokerage API screen. See the image below:

TradeStation (Margin) allows you to execute borrowed-shorts while TradeStation (Cash) does not. You can add both brokerages if you would like to execute borrowed-shorts strategy as well.

If you run a Short strategy on a (Cash) based brokerage, you will need to own the actual stock in order to execute your Short strategy.