the markets seem to have opened and are trading slightly positive and regardless of how high they might push up today, if you are considering going long or covering your shorts have to ask yourself: with all the blow-ups, bank run on deposits, talks of greece exiting the euro, JPM derivatives trade blow-up and the accompanying fall-out/spill-over, etc…, who will want to go home long over the weekend? maybe we do gap up on monday on some gov’t intervention over the weekend but my guess is that we’ll see some selling down into the close today as traders might not want to roll the dice on holding too many longs over the weekend. then again, it is options expiration today so there will be a lot of position squaring and anything goes on OpEx days.
bottom line is that you might want to expect and plan for some volatility today and take that into account if you have any stops that are close to being triggered. removing or loosening up stops on days like this can cut both ways; it might prevent your stops from being clipped just before the stock continues to move in the direction that you expected or it could just serve to expand you loses beyond what you had originally accounted for. personally i like to give my positions a little extra room on their stops on a day like today but i can also make a case for not doing so, especially for a more disciplined, risk-adverse trader. however, i always leave my limit orders to sell (longs) or cover (shorts) at the original profit targets even when i expect volatility (naturally, as the point of a trade is to exit at your profit target as soon as it is hit).
good luck today and make sure that you are trading with position sizes that are commensurate with your risk tolerance. i’ve spoke before about adjusting your position size relative to the beta, or volatility of each stock or etf that you trade. however, that same principal needs to be applied to your holding at times like this when the VIX is elevated and still increasing. in other words, if you normally trade $10,000 of the SPY and you are not a very aggressive trader, then you might reduced that down to $7k or $8k right now, just as a general example, to account for the additional volatility.