February ended up being a good, but not great month. I met my goal of 10R and I’m feeling more confident and am ready to increase my trading size ever so slightly. Here’s a link to every trade I made in February. You’ll notice that I made the fewest trades since last August and had my best month so far in terms of dollars made and expectancy. I attribute this to … luck. I learned some valuable lessons in January, thanks in part to Estocastica who eyeballed my trades and made a suggestion or two.

I’ll devote an entire post to what I learned in January. If you look at my worst trades from the month of January, you’ll see what the problem was.

I expect JOYG was on a lot of trading radars today. It was the only stock I found worth trading. I shorted it below the 7th 15 minute candle and was stopped out one bar later. I thought my day was over, but then I saw another nice entry point, this time the bar closed below the OR low. When I trade the same stock twice in a day it seems like it never works out for me. Today I ended up a little down for the day, basically break even.

Here’s a chart and my StockTickr generated chart review (RSS) will be up shortly after the close.

*Or most anything.

Most often I use Trade-Ideas to find gaps to daytrade (look for a post soon showing my morning routine). Normally that scan produces anywhere between 30 and 80 results for both the short and long side (so 60 to 160 total) which I whittle down to usually less than 30 stocks (a lot of times even fewer) that I know there’s at least a possibility that I might trade. The entire process takes about 4 minutes and I’m getting faster the more I do it.

Well, with today’s huge gap down my trusty scan on the short side gave me a list of 443 candidates – ouch! I refused to take the time to scan through that many candidates, so it’s looking like I won’t trade today.

I used the time instead to look into a CyberTrader feature that I’ve wanted to explore more fully. It’s called the Stock Screener List tool and it turns out to be quite powerful. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ll bet a lot of us spend a good bit of time hoping for a market day like this one. What happens when one actually occurs? I sit on the sidelines! Hopefully Tim Knight and the permabears were prepared and capitalized on a nice down day.

What am I taking away from today? A couple things. It’s not that I found flaws in my system per se, and it’s not that I was unprepared or unaccustomed to trading the short side.

I was totally unprepared for the sheer volume of candidates today. On a normal day my scans produce at most 120 stocks or so that I filter down to about 20. Today on shorts alone, my scan produced 443 candidates. That was totally overwhelming and I pretty much threw in the towel for the day when I saw that. I thought my morning routine to find gaps was pretty efficient until today. 99% of the days it is efficient and almost always takes less than 5 minutes to come up with my list. I just need to have a plan for days like this.

I’m quite interested to see how other dummy/gap traders handled today. Do you have a plan for filtering through an overwhelming list of choices? X? Esto? Zoomie? TraderMike?

I am hoping to post more about my own trading, which I have been focusing on with my head down for a while now. I have set a goal to post more of my trades on this blog, but I have a lot of commitments so we’ll see how long I am able to last.

I am sure RIMM was on a lot of trading radars today – a gap up nearing an all time high. The first two candles were a little suspect, but it seemed ready to move after the strong third 15 minute candle.

I traded RIMM off the 6th bar on the 15 minute chart. It was the narrowest candle of the morning at that point. I was stopped out during the 15th candle for a -0.63R loss. Moving my stop too soon is becoming a recurring theme in my trading. I will devote an entire post to it soon, I hope. Here’s my eSignal chart for my trade in RIMM and here’s my StockTickr-generated chart review.

Since I started day trading after taking a trip to see TraderMike last summer, I knew it was going to be a little easier with more than one monitor. The video card that I happened to have in the computer I built supported dual monitors, so I hooked another monitor up and have used a two monitor setup (one 19 inch and one 17 inch) for several months.

Read on for more about my current trading computer config. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been using CyberTrader for several months now and I think they’re great. Besides a great platform, their support is excellent. Yesterday I had an idea that I thought would be good to add to CyberTrader, so I called them up to make the suggestion. I was on hold for about 1 minute which is by far the most I’ve ever had to wait to get a person on the line – it was lunch time, so that may have been the holdup.

My suggestion was something along these lines. In the CyberTrader watchlist tool, there are several columns you can add. There is no “Volume %” column however. The Volume % column is today’s volume as a percent of a stock’s average 90 day volume. This column is the only reason I still have QuoteTracker up during the day. Sorting by this column is quite convenient. I always include QQQQ in my watchlist in QuoteTracker so I can see which stocks are trading more than average compared with the overall market. Here’s an image of the column:

In CyberTrader, you can add a column for Average Volume for 1 month, 6 months, 20 days, 5 days, and YTD, but there’s no column for Volume % for each of those values, so you have to do quick math in your head to figure out how heavy the volume is for a particular stock.

When I spoke to the support person, it was obvious that he understood what I was asking for and realized that it would be a good feature for the platform and why it would be. He immediately added a feature request to the Platform Dev group and, although he couldn’t guarantee it, I’m reasonably confident that this feature will make it into a future release of CyberTrader.

The entire call took about 3 minutes and it was obvious that I spoke to someone with actual trading experience.

We’ve been quietly working on a new feature that integrates StockTickr with one of my favorite tools that I use every day that I trade: Trade-Ideas. It’s available now to StockTickr Pro subscribers (signup here). Here are some FAQs if you’re ready to start using it and here’s where you can configure your rules. Read on for more of an explanation.
Read the rest of this entry »

I’m still quite pleased with how the interview series is progressing. I’ve learned a tremendous amount from the interviewees and I think it’s great to hear more about people’s background in this online community of ours.

Here’s the most popular interviews in the series in 2006 by page view. Look who’s number one – I guess that shouldn’t surprise anyone!

Thanks to everyone who has participated in the series. If you have any ideas for other traders who would make good interviews, please let me know!

It’s well into February, though. Why am I just now posting a 2006 “best of” list? I’ve had a hectic year so far. It’s taken me a while to catch up in many areas of my life.

1. Trader-X
2. Gary B. Smith, the Chartman
3. Michelle B.
4. Dave Landry, Swing Trader
5. Van K. Tharp
6. Ugly from Uglychart.com
7. J.C., the NYSE Scalper
8. Brian Shannon, AlphaTrends
9. Smita Sadana
10. Bruce Brotnov
11. Alan Farley
12. TraderMike
13. Brett Steenbarger
14. Jeff White, the Stock Bandit
15. Bill Cara
16. Richard Todd
17. Dan Mirkin, Trade-Ideas
18. Kernan of TRADEthemove.com
19. Steve Nison of Candlestick Charts
20. Roger Nusbaum
21. Tom C.
22. Trader Gav
23. Estocastica
24. Jamie, Wall St. Warrior
25. Nusair Bawla (alibawla on StockTickr)

For the next interview in the StockTickr Interview Series (RSS feed), I spoke with MC, a.k.a. PinoyTRADER. I discovered MC’s site after Trader Mike linked to it a few weeks ago. MC’s performance is spectacular – which apparently brings with it a lot of criticism.

It’s disappointing to see anonymous criticism of someone’s success. It sounds like someone has taken some recent painful losses in the market and they’re trying to take it out on someone who’s apparently quite successful. I’m glad to see others in the community come to his defense.

Read on for more about how MC trades, more about his background, and how he backtests. Submit your questions in the comments and I’ll see if MC can answer them.

Sign up for StockTickr Pro and turn your trading around.

Read the rest of this entry »