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?

Related posts:

1. No Trades Today – The True Cost of a BLT Sandwich
2. No Trades Today, Almost in LH
3. The “Late to the Trading Desk” Exercise
4. Back from Vacation, Trades in CMC, WNG
5. Using CyberTrader’s Stock Screener List to Find Gaps*