I was starting to wonder whether I was going to have a down month of over 3R. Luckily, I stuck with it today and made 3.8R in RIMM. That pulled my profit and loss for the month to just under breakeven. Here’s a calendar view of my trading for June. Hopefully I’ll find the time to devote to a full monthly review on this blog - I feel like I’ve learned a lot this month.
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Nice uptrending day in the Qs yesterday. My watchlist was lopsided as I had several short candidates and only BBY as a candidate on the long side. Nothing set up for me, although I was alerted to NKE by Eyal. There was a nice entry at 12:30 on the 30 minute chart - I passed because of the red opening bar and it was still below the opening range high. I’m probably still a little gun shy given the mistakes I’ve made this month.
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There were very few opportunities today - a good day to shut down the trading platform early. I had a trade in GOOG that I was stopped out at breakeven. I almost passed on this trade since it was so close to R2. Here’s the chart:
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Just a day after preaching to myself about patience before entries, on Friday I screwed up a trade by moving my stop too early - something I’d been working on for some time. It’s a difficult rule to follow, but time and time again I look back at my journal and see that waiting at least one hour before moving my stop to breakeven is absolutely the right thing for me to do. Friday’s trade in SMSI was more dramatic support of this. SMSI made a nice hammer on the OR high on the 30 minute chart. Within a few minutes it went 2R in my direction. Because of my earlier losses this week, I went ahead and moved my stop to breakeven after about 45 minutes - it had reached 2R and seemed like it was on its way to 3R.
You can guess what happened next. I was stopped out at breakeven about 5 minutes later and then price reached new highs later in the day. ;-( While this was frustrating, it’s quite clear what I need to do going forward. And, of course, there are worse things to get frustrated about than a breakeven trade.
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First off, the bad news. I lost 3.2R today. That’s my worst day ever.
The good news is that this could have easily been a profitable day for me had I not gotten anxious with my entries. I started off with a couple orders that didn’t get filled - this is becoming a recurring theme for me in my breakout trading. At this point, I already felt like I had lost money even though I hadn’t made a single trade.
Then, I traded BW short way too early. I highlighted on this chart where I entered and where I should have entered.
After this, I traded BNI for a breakeven breakout trade. At this point, I should have pulled the plug, but I just had to try one more trade in HD, which turned into another loss.
That turned a bad day into a really bad day. The funny thing is when I have days like this, they are always tremendous learning opportunities and almost always caused by overtrading.
I’ve been concentrating on applying patience in my stop strategy and it has been paying off. Now I need to take a step back and apply some patience in my pre-trade routine.
Here’s a fact that surprised me - I took a look back at my StockTickr journal and noticed that not a single long trade has worked for me this month regardless of the system. That’s pretty surprising since my long trades typically outperform my short trades over large samples.
Here’s another chart in DRI, which is a nice dummy trade, although I typically don’t take many trades like this any more. Hopefully TraderMike caught this one. 
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I started off the day with a silly trade in CTRP - I was quickly stopped out for a 1R loss. I then traded BMC off the inverted hammer on the OR low at 10:15. This worked out well - it’s trades like these that make me happy that I started scaling out of trades a while back. ;-) 2.5R on a full position size.
Next I traded BBY, which was a good bit more frustrating. I entered off the inverted hammer on the OR low at 11:00. I was barely stopped out a half hour later or so, only to see the price continue down in the afternoon. It looks like Prospectus did a better job at placing his stop on this one.
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I take just a week off and what happens? Trader-X decides to stop blogging and Apple releases Safari for Windows (huh?). Wow. I’m going to have to think twice before going on vacation again.
Today’s market makes me glad I tend toward under-trading. No trades today, although I did consider trading FCS off this nice hammer off the 89% fib extension. It looks like it would have worked out for a decent gain. I also had an order in BIDU that didn’t get filled. Hopefully there will be more opportunities tomorrow.
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For the next interview in the StockTickr Interview Series (RSS feed), I spoke with Gary from CalmTrading. I discovered Gary’s site after Trader Mike linked to it a few weeks ago. Gary’s openness is what keeps me reading his site. He posts all his trades, good or bad and provides appropriate, honest commentary on his trading. His post on patience is a good example.
Read on for more about how Gary trades, more about his background, and what he recommends for new traders.
There’s still a 30 day free trial to StockTickr where you can automatically record trades in your journal directly from your trading platform - no more typing! Read how Joey Fundora sharpened his trading edge using StockTickr.
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Better late than never! My trading in May started off well, then stagnated a bit during the middle of the month, and then went out with a bang. Here’s the calendar view from StockTickr. I made a total of 7.85 R for the month. Here’s my breakdown by the tags I use in my journal: Read the rest of this entry »
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There was quite a bit more on my radar yesterday, but I only took one trade in VOL. I was surprised that none of the stocks I was watching yesterday on the short side really moved that much during the downtrending day in the overall markets. Overall it was another boring day for relative to the QQQQ carnage. I’ll be out all next week and I may or may not trade today - we’ll see.
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