Like other traders out there, I’m glad September is over. It seems like everyone is looking forward to October thinking things will get better – even moreso than the yearning we heard for September back in August.

Here’s my trading journal calendar from September:

Things were going pretty well in the first part of the month and then things just stagnated. The last three days I traded this month I gave a good bit of gains back. Here’s my cumulative R for the month:

My expectancy and win rate were down from August, but I’m still positive for this month so I feel very fortunate about that. I’ve learned so much about trading over the last two months. I’m taking two main points away from September: one is that I need to work on having the discipline to stay out of the market on non-trending days. The other point has to do with timeframes (15 versus 30 minute charts) that I’ll devote a post to later.

Important Note: I’ll be changing brokers on Monday, so I won’t be trading. This, of course, means that the market will trend like no other that day – watch for it. (There were two days I was unable to trade in August – one was this day which would’ve been a great day to dummy trade.)

For the next interview in the StockTickr Interview Series (RSS feed), I spoke with Roger Nusbaum, a financial advisor who builds diversified portfolios for individual investors as well as some institutions. Roger maintains a popular site where he ruminates about the markets. Oh yeah, he’s also a wildland firefighter! I love that in a time where most money managers would put on their Sunday best for a photo, Roger’s image on his site is of him eating an ice cream cone – in mid bite!

I think it’s also worth noting that Roger gave me responses in record time – much faster than anyone else in the series. Bruce Brotnov was a reasonably close second, though.

Read on for how daytraders should approach diversification, the growing importance of foreign markets, and how having 10 stocks each with 10% of your portfolio is not diversification!

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I’ve been dummy trading thanks to MaoXian, TraderMike, Ugly, and Trader-X. Up until today my biggest loss was in BOOM on 8/30 at -1.14R.

Today was another wake up call (kind of like the previous one). I took a long position in TSO shortly after 10AM when it formed a tight 15 minute candle after gapping up at the open. As I’d hoped, the price headed up in my direction for several minutes.

Just after 10:30 the stock plunged quickly and I realized I was going to be stopped out. (Dang!) The price flew right through my stop and several hours apparently several seconds went by before my order was filled at a price well below my stop. I was pretty upset until I saw the price continue to plummet. Here’s all the charts in this trade that StockTickr captured for me.

The first one is the 15 minute chart that I traded off of:

Here’s the 5 minute chart that shows the precipitous decline:

Now, I know this comes with the territory – but that doesn’t make it less painful. What does make it less painful is to realize how bad it really could have been. I feel extremely lucky that this swan only had a hint of grey in it! It wasn’t nearly as painful as Ugly’s trade in FWLT the other day. Ouch.

It’s these types of setbacks that I actually find strangely comforting. What I really worry about is a long string of successful trades that would, no doubt, lull me into a false sense of security and make me do something stupid. The market is in control and there’s not a thing I can do about it and it’s good to be reminded of that often.

Last week, I posted a short term analysis of Devon Energy Corp (NYSE: DVN). Every time I do one of these short term analysis pieces, I’m going to follow up on them one week later. Especially if the analysis turned out to be incorrect, I’ll try to see if there was a reason, or if it was just bad luck. In the case of DVN, though, things went very well!

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After seeing Jamie post his watchlist yesterday, and having JOYG on my radar since it was poised for new lows, I was stalking it all day looking for an entry. I’m dummy trading so I’m looking for narrow range bars to trade against.

I tend to trade the 15 minute bars earlier in the day and then switch to 30 minute bars around mid morning. Alas, most bars in JOYG were too wide. The only way I could’ve traded JOYG today was to trade against (and size my position against) not the previous bar, but the one before the previous bar. That is, trade against the 11:30 bar entering the trade during the 12:30 bar (30 minute bar). Here’s the chart where I’ve attempted to illustrate the situation.

I was IMing with Trader Mike the other day where he pulled a similar stunt with AAPL when it broke 75 a few days ago. I also know that Ugly occasionally gets creative with the 15 minute candles, but this is a little different.

My question is: are there any dummy traders out there who ever take the occasional trade this way and how do you decide that it’s a good idea and when do you pass on this type of setup? I’m looking to formulate some rules for my own trading to prevent myself from “creating” a trade when there really isn’t any, yet still be able to capitalize on a profitable situation like JOYG today.

BTW, I was waiting for Trader Jamie to post his trade of the day – I knew it would be JOYG and was interested to see how he played it. He entered during the opening range which is something I don’t have the stomach for yet.

When I started Dummy Trading a few weeks ago, I was really interested in capturing screenshots of the charts of my trades so I could review at the end of the day. It was important to me to capture my entry point, stop, exit, and what the general market did that day. To do this, I ended up taking screen grabs and annotating them with my entries and exits. I’d save the image with some descriptive name like: trade.20060803.long.GES.png which would indicate a long trade in GES on 8/3/06. Here’s that exact screenshot that’s sitting somewhere on my hard drive gathering dust (click to enlarge):

This approach worked for a while, but there are a few reasons I got tired of it:

• It’s too much work to do this for every trade – I had to figure out where I entered and exited and draw them on the chart.
• It was inconvenient to review the trades in this format – my trades were on my hard drive in a relatively inaccessible format.
• Sometimes I’d trade off different charts and there’s only so much room in a single screenshot.
• Did I mention that it’s too much work? If I didn’t remember to do the screen grabs right at the close, I was starting to just let it slide.

Because of the reasons above, I wasn’t reviewing the charts like I should. The whole point of reviewing your trades is to learn from them and my solution wasn’t working.

So, I decided to build a feature into StockTickr that does the heavy lifting for me. Instead of a screengrab, StockTickr generates charts for me. It’s called the StockTickr Chart Review and here’s how it works.

• I enter a trade into the StockTickr Trading Journal like I normally do.
• I close out the trade and enter it into my journal (again, like I normally do).
• About 30 minutes after the market close, StockTickr automatically generates candlestick charts in multiple timetrames (5, 10, 15, 30 minute bars) for each of my trades that day, plotting my entry, stop, and exit.
• In addition to the charts for the stock I traded, StockTickr also captures the charts for QQQQ and SPY with a line indicating the time that I entered my equity trade.

When your chart review is ready, you’ll see an icon next to the ticker symbol in your trading journal:

Here’s a trade I made in SIMG the other day, and here’s another one I made yesterday (it didn’t turn out as well).

Share your Charts

Your chart review is private by default, but you can also share your charts with the world, if you’d like. To enable sharing, go into your profile and share all your charts:

Or, if you prefer, you can share charts on an individual basis:

When you share your charts, they’ll show up in the StockTickr Chart Review section, where you can filter everyone’s shared charts by time frame (only show 5, 10, 15, 30 minute charts), trade type (long or short), winning or losing trades, and based on minimum or maximum R. For example, this link shows 15 minute charts for short trades that resulted in at least 1R of profit.

There’s even an RSS feed for the StockTickr Chart Review if you want to follow along in your RSS reader.

You can also copy the charts to your own site if you’d like to share them. You can also feel free to simply link to the chart on your own site (i.e., we’ll host the chart).

Bottom Line

This has dramatically streamlined my trade review at the end of the day because so much of the process is automated (I love automation). Because different time frames are captured, I’ve noticed some characteristics of my trades in a different time frame than I traded. Also, since much of my success depends on guessing the overall market trend during the day, the QQQQ and SPY charts help me remember what the market was doing on that particular day. Best of all, I don’t have to lift a finger – no more screengrabs!

The StockTickr Chart Review is available now for StockTickr Pro subscribers. Sign up today and get copies of the TRADEthemove.com e-books on fibonacci trading.

For the next interview in the StockTickr Interview Series (RSS feed), I spoke with Dave Johnson, a former stock broker and now full time individual investor. Dave posts on his site, DayveJohnson on the Markets. Dave’s site caught my eye a few months ago because of the system he used and tracked on his site.

Read on for more about how Dave got started trading, what he trades and doesn’t trade intraday, and why trading for him is like crossing the street.

Richard from Move the Markets (and now StockTickr) submitted a few questions as well.

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I think Devon Energy Corp (NYSE: DVN) is at an interesting place right now. It’s an energy company based out of Oklahoma, primarily dealing in oil and natural gas. Their recent gulf oil discovery news got them a lot of sudden attention. A couple of analyst upgrades quickly followed, and the stock price made the kind of exaggerated up move that one might expect, but which can’t be sustained. Now, after the price has fallen back to its previous levels again, the question is: what can we expect going forward?

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I got some feedback a few days ago from BTSTrader (his site). He had a great suggestion for the StockTickr Reports page which details the most profitable trades taken by StockTickr users in the past 14 days.

The report had only open trades displayed, where a user had added a stock to their watchlist and hadn’t yet removed it. BTSTrader suggested that closed trades are more important and should be displayed by default. I agreed and just updated the report to show closed trades by default. There’s a button where you can display only open trades instead.

Thanks, BTSTrader. If anyone has any other suggestions, please contact us.

For the next interview in the StockTickr Interview Series (RSS feed), I spoke with JC from NYSE Trader. Do you consider yourself an active trader? How many trades per day makes you an active trader? I used to think 1 a day was pretty active. JC is a scalper, the ultimate in active trading. He made 2,241 trades – not last year or last quarter, but in the month of August!

JC’s site caught my eye because it gives you a window into the life of a scalper. What makes them tick? What type of profits are likely? And, my goodness, how can you possibly overcome the costs of commissions? (Hint: he only pays 18.5 cents per trade regardless of share size.)

Read on for more about how JC got started trading, how he trades the markets, and what type of person it takes to be a scalper. JC has agreed to answer questions in the comments, so ask away! (Although if you ask a question during market hours I have a feeling he won’t get to it until later.)

Richard from Move the Markets (and now StockTickr) submitted a few great questions as well.

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