Calculating a trailing stop order price

There are many strategies to trade stocks. One basic type of trade that many investors employ is the stop order. A stop order is an order placed by an investor to buy or sell a stock that executes whenever the market price reaches a certain point. Stop orders are useful to both prevent huge losses and protect gains.

For this recipe, we will only be examining stop orders used to sell currently owned stocks. In a typical stop order, the price does not change throughout the lifetime of the order. For instance, if you purchased a stock for $100 per share, you might want to set a stop order at $90 per share to limit your downside to 10%.

A more advanced strategy would be to continually modify the sale price of the stop order to track the value of the stock if it increases in value. This is called a trailing stop order. Concretely, if the same $100 stock increases to $120, then a trailing stop order 10% below the current market value...