How do you sell half on Shorting Positions!?

Hey Jesse Fleming 

You could open a order ticket and close half of the quantity from there.

#shorting the stock
self.ticket = self.MarketOrder("SPY", -10)

#closing half of the short position
self.MarketOrder(self.ticket.Symbol, (self.ticket.Quantity/2))

If you're not sure if the order has filled you can also use this:

self.MarketOrder(self.ticket.Symbol, (self.ticket.QuantityFilled/2))

Meaning that you would buy back the half quantity that you shorted.

Hope it helps ;)

Hey Nico Xenox ! Your service is always greatly appreciated. 

I am sorry to report back and say that this does the same thing and has the same issue as before. I am not exiting my short position or buying them back, I am entering a long position at the worst times and using the profits I have from my shorting position to long with. 

And now I have two questions for you my friend:

Do you have any other ideas of how to exit a short position? 

And,

if your next idea works, how can I combine a longing and shorting strategy together? Is there a way to differentiate the short and long positions in my if statements? I am aware of self.Portfolio.Invested but will it conflate the two rendering it completely useless in a combined algorithm. Because in my if statements, i must be able to say ‘if we are in short position’ and ‘if we are in long position’. Otherwise, I would be getting incorrect entries and notifications constantly. 

Thank you so much for your time, 

You deserve a raise. 

Jesse

Ignore that second question I had. I can use a long toggle and a short toggle to differentiate between the two. Now the only thing I am confused about is the first question I had! 

How to buy half of a shorting position in an algorithmic trading platform haha 

Looking forward to hearing from you brother!

Hey Jesse Fleming,

Yes you're right the quantity on the ticket does not update. But for closing a short position you have to buy back something. I played around a little bit and I will give you the tools for your algo.

#Absolute quantity of the security. Meaning that even if you have short positions you will have a positive number
self.Securities["AAPL"].Holdings.AbsoluteQuantity
#check if symbol is short or long
self.Securities["GME"].Holdings.IsShort

What you could do is the following:

self.MarketOrder(self.ticket.Symbol, (self.Securities[self.ticket.Symbol].Holdings.AbsoluteQuantity/2))

This does the job. (NOTE: numbers in the debugger wont change/reload before it enters again the OnData event.)
If you dont sell the half exactly after shorting then there should be no problem ;)

You have outdone yourself once again. 

Thank you for your hard work. 

I'm sure we will be chatting soon again Mr. Nico

Cheers brother