Flipper - Not the Magic Gimmick

 Do you flip your positions? I've been thinking about this recently as I've been reviewing some of my trades from more profitable month that I had this year. One of the things that I noticed was that I was flipping my position pretty often. Flipping your position is being in a position and then seeing it move against your direction and deciding that there is good potential in the other direction so you close your position and open a new one in the other direction. There are buttons for this, it doesn't take long.  I remember the reasoning besides me doing this. I would watch stocks trade up and down and while they may have only moved 50 cents up in a day, they would have made several moves in both directions for 2 dollars or more.  I thought well, I usually don't catch the whole move, so maybe I should try to catch multiple moves in and get a bigger piece of the pie.  Needless to say I've backed off from this recently and I was trying to think why. so Why? I thin it had to do with the Volatility at the time, VIX. It was pretty high, and stocks don't trend so great in high volatility. And recently VIX has been low, though it is getting elevated at the current time.  Also I think I stopped because I wasn't using good risk management. You see, if a stock is kind of trending in one direction and you're trying to scalp both directions, then one of those directions you will be fighting the trend.  I wasn't thinking about this so much at the time so I would use the same risk for either direction which was uhem uhem - I didn't really have a risk level :-/   So now that VIX is getting higher again, I was thinking I may need to pull these scalp trades out of the bag to use again, but we'll see.  How about you? Always Long? Always Short? Or do you FlipFlop like a beached fish?  Alrighty, Have a great day or night wherever you are! Cheers!