It was another boring day as everyone waited for the FOMC announcement, I guess. I traded CWTR which I thought was a pretty darn good setup. I ended up being stopped out by just a couple cents about an hour after I entered. I thought this was going to turn into one of those trades that confirms my “don’t move my stop to soon” strategy and it almost did. Perhaps on a day where the market gapped up instead of down this might have been a winner.

The first thing I noticed today was even though the market gapped down significantly, there were VERY few stocks that gapped today. I ended up with 5 longs and 5 shorts on my trading radar at 10:05AM or so and most of those fizzled out badly and lost their privilege of being on my monitor very quickly.

I also wanted to thank those who send along encouraging comments about this blog - I really appreciate it!

Here’s the chart of CWTR:

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I got back from vacation not really in the mood to trade. May has been profitable, but nothing like last month. I’ve been distracted for much of the month and it has showed in my trading.

Before I get to the trades, let me suggest that you listen to Tim’s interview with Trader-X. X is someone I’ve learned a lot from and his blog is first on my reading list at the end of the day.

Also, I was disappointed to see that Esto decided to stop blogging. I certainly respect his decision to stop, but I will certainly miss his posts!!

Yesterday seemed like an average day. After the first 30 minutes of trading there was only one breakout play I was able to take (CMC, breakeven) and nothing else seemed even remotely setting up to trade. At 10AM, I ran my gap scan and found a reasonable number of gaps to watch.

I ended up trading WNG against the fifth 15 minute bar. It turned out to be my most profitable daytrade to date in terms of dollars! When I posted it to Jaiku shortly after taking the trade, Richard pointed out that WNG was a takeover candidate at 80, which I didn’t realize.

Trader-X always says that there is something magical about Fibonacci numbers and there are trades like these where I’d have to agree. I had taken profit and was trying to ride out the remaining half of my position with what I thought was a loose stop - not loose enough, though! I was stopped out by 5 cents during the 2PM bar. It wasn’t even in my thought process that WNG might hit the Fib extension, but it sure did.

Here’s the chart.

Here is another setup that I didn’t trade, but would have worked out although it wouldn’t have hit the Fib extension. I was turned off by the action in the second and third bar.

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I took a mediocre breakout trade in AAPL and a dummy/fib trade in JCP today, both losers. The JCP trade stopped me out just after I got in. There couldn’t have been more than a couple executions below my stop price - in fact, my stop ended up getting filled well above my stop price. I missed SWN which I should have seen - it was on my screen all day right in front of my face.

Here’s the trade in JCP.

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For the next interview in the StockTickr Interview Series (RSS feed), I spoke with John Forman, a trading coach and author of The Essentials of Trading, a recently published book for beginning traders. John has his own site where you can contact him directly.

John was a collegiate volleyball coach and in the interview he talks about the similarities of coaching athletes and traders, the most common trading mistake he comes across among traders, and how hugely important keeping a trading journal is.

John has agreed to field questions in the comments of this post, so ask away!

Read the rest of this entry »

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Joey Fundora offers a glimpse into how he turned his trading around using StockTickr in this case study he volunteered to write for us. Joey uses StockTickr to “forward test” his trading. He uses StockTickr to figure out where he does well and doesn’t do well by tagging his trades and using the built in reports to gain visibility into certain aspects of his trading that aren’t possible without StockTickr.

Check out the case study and also check out Joey’s blog, DowntownTrader.

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Here’s a video showing the StockTickr Broker Plugin at work. It currently comes in two flavors: CyberTrader and Interactive Brokers. As I’ve picked up my trading pace, this plugin has been a huge time saver by automating my record keeping. So now StockTickr automatically enters my trades into my journal and generates all my charts with my entry, exit, and stops plotted on them.

This only becomes more valuable with time as my database of performance history in my journal gets larger and larger. I can filter my journal on all sorts of fields - daytrades versus holding overnight, uptrend days in the overall market versus downtrend days, and a ton of other useful parameters.

Sign up today and automate your record keeping.
Read the rest of this entry »

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Longtime StockTickr Pro user Joey Fundora wrote another article for Investopedia that you might find interesting.

It’s called Find A Trend With The Partial Retrace.

I took a couple losing trades today in RIMM and SSRI.

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Data entry is boring and error-prone - wouldn’t it be nice to be able to pull your trade executions right from your broker into your journal automatically? That’s exactly what you can do if you’re a CyberTrader client or now an Interactive Brokers client.

One StockTickr Pro subscriber says with this plugin along with automatic chart review that he’ll save 30 to 45 minutes every day that he used to spend manually keeping records.

Here’s how it works:

1. Sign up for StockTickr Pro if you’re not already.
2. Download and install the StockTickr/IB Plugin.
3. When you’re ready to upload your trades to StockTickr, simply start the plugin from your start menu.
4. Click Logon to connect to TWS and StockTickr.
5. Click Load Executions to load the executions into the plugin window.
6. Click Send to StockTickr to automatically send your executions into your journal.

The plugin will automatically compact your executions into trades. For example, let’s say you put in a trade of 200 shares and got filled for 100 shares at 50.10 and the other 100 shares at 50.12. The plugin automatically determines that was a single trade and loads 200 shares at 50.11.

There’s a free trial for StockTickr Pro, so sign up today.

Here’s a screenshot of the plugin in action:

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For the next interview in the StockTickr Interview Series (RSS feed), I spoke with Denise K. Shull, a trading coach and mentor at Talking Traders. Like many good coaches and traders, Denise has a background in psychology.

Read on for how that background in psychology got Denise where she is today, why “controlling your emotions” is probably a mistake, and what traders should be including in the trading journals, but aren’t.

Read the rest of this entry »

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I traded MA again yesterday, in similar fashion as the day before. I made a little over 2R on the trade. A much better start to May than April! Here’s the chart:

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