Latest progress on setting up trading

An area where I have paid relatively little interest in the past has been types of order, i.e. market, stop and limits. Previously, I have mainly used market orders but, again, Aldridge's High Frequency Trading has caused me to re-think this whole issue. There is also another factor that I'm thinking about in this area. Sometimes short-term market moves are just so fast that manual trade input isn't feasible - by contrast, a stop order to open will see the trade carried away with the general market move. Once or twice recently I have fallen victim to this sort of move - so time spent on this issue should be well spent This point particularly applies to very short term trading (which is clearly why it is in the Aldridge book), especially systems with fixed profit targets, trading many times a day. Sometimes it is easy to forget that a system trading 10 times a day, winning 7 and losing 3 with wins and losses equal at 15pts, would make a daily return of net +4 trades worth 15 pts each per day - a total of 60 pts which for the FT100 is over 1% unleveraged per day!! And how many 15 pt swings are there per day in the FT? - answer is usually well above 10 per day. So lots to play for. And a point made about short-term trading which I have come to believe strongly is that it is much easier to predict directionally 30 minutes ahead from particular market set up that it is for longer periods. Predictability tails off sharply with time.