Efficient Stop Loss calculations? (Finance)

Hi,

I'm new to Matlab, but have been an amateur in the quantitative trading system development scene for a while. For my University dissertation I'm testing a variety of trading rules using Matlab.

Speed/efficiency is very important.

I want to incorporate a Stop-loss and Take-profit in my strategy whereby trades are closed when price reaches a certain distance away from the trade opening price.

Trades are stored in a vector whereby 1 is a long position and -1 is a short position. My data is 2 year tick data, that has been converted into time periods (e.g. 15min) to give Open, High, Low, Close (OHLC) values and trading decisions are based one these.

Ideally I want to calculate stop-loss/take-profit exits using tick data to be more accurate, however if the most efficient way involves looping through 2 years of tick data then this might not be feasible.

Does anyone know an efficient way to do this?

Thanks,

Chris