Well, if there was any question who is in charge now, I’m going to go out on a limb and say it’s DA BEARS.  We had a large gap up at the open and I had over 200 longs on my Trade-Ideas alerts by 10AM.  I started out with an Opening Gap Fade which worked out well (thanks, Mike!)  I haven’t tried those in a while, but it seemed too good to pass up today.  It’s nice starting the day off with 1R from fading a Q gap.

Most of my profits for the day were from SIMO which I traded off the 3rd 15 minute bar:

I also had basically a breakeven trade in LCAV.  Looks like OONR7 made a similar trade.

I made two other trades (1/2 position size) in CROX from my momentum system which didn’t work out.  This finishes my best month ever on the least amount of shares I’ve traded.  Look for a full monthly review soon.  I hope you were able to capitalize on the decline over the past few days!

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There were surprisingly few candidates on my radar today.  In fact, I only found 4 worth keeping on my screens after 10AM.  I traded VCLK off the 3rd 10 minute bar.  It reversed along with the market only leaving me with 1R for the day.  I’ll take it!

I used some of my spare time today to add some new features into StockTickr.  I’ll be announcing them soon.  Here’s my trade in VCLK.

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For the next interview in the StockTickr Interview Series (RSS feed), I spoke with Toni Hansen a trading coach and mentor.

Toni writes frequent market updates on her trading blog, where she is quick to admit mistakes, something I respect.

Read on for more about Toni Hansen, how she’s never read a trading book from start to finish, and how she uses her trading journal to backtest. Submit your questions in the comments and I’ll see if Toni can answer them.

Read the rest of this entry »

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It started out as a slow day today.  I looked closely but passed on CROX, BLG, and CYMI.  I had just about given up on the day when I saw SEPR setting up below the OR low.  I entered on the break of the inverted hammer at 11:15.  After waiting an hour, I took half off the table and put a very loose stop that ended up getting hit after lunch.  It ended up closing right at the lows of the day.  I made 4R on a full position size which ranks second on my list of most profitable daytrades.  (This one from May is first).

Here’s the chart of BLG, which would have worked as well, but I passed.

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I’ve picked up Dr. Brett’s book again, Enhancing Trading Performance (the one with a picture of him on the cover) and ran across this nugget in a section called “The Best Piece of Advice You’ll Ever Get From Dr. Brett” on page 221.

If you are developing your trading expertise, do it in a steady, progressive manner that creates neither excessive emotional highs nor extreme emotional lows.  Do not traumatize yourself: The best treatment of all is prevention.

The best way to incorporate psychology into your trading plans is to ensure, through risk management, that you never expose yourself to outsized market outcomes.

It never really occurred to me that one should try to avoid outsized market outcomes that are actually too profitable, but this makes perfect sense.  It might be nice to have a few extremely profitable outcomes, but when you do always keep in mind the risk that you take on to get them.  As Van Tharp always says, there’s no mistake worse than one where you make money doing it.

This reminds me of some excerpts from the Market Wizards book series where some traders would actually revisit their trading plan if they ended up making more money that their backtesting had reasonably predicted because it often meant that there was probably more risk in their system than they realized.

These concepts are front and center in my mind as I try to find more opportunities to trade.  There will (should!) be more profitable days, but this necessarily means that there will be larger down days as well.

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Nice big drop in the overall markets today.  (Like Howard, I love reading TraderMike’s analysis after a day like this.)  Just the opposite of the other day, there were a ton of stocks that appeared on my short scan.  It took me a while to narrow down my list to an amount that was manageable.

This was the type of day where I need to be making a killing instead of ending up with about 1R of profit like I did.  This could have easily been my best day ever.  I’m going to make some adjustments in my order mechanics based on a discussion with Eyal and Thiago, which would have helped today.  For some reason, I started putting in stop limit orders for all my trades which have caused me to miss out on some trades.  Since the uptick rule was eliminated, I’m not going to worry that much about slippage (which is why I was using stop limit orders) and see how it goes.

I had a partial fill in AKAM which worked really nicely.

LVLT hit the fibonacci extension for a nice trade:

I was long AAPL and BIDU which would have probably worked out on a different day.

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I’m a little behind on posting my trades, but here they are from Wednesday which was a difficult day.  I ended up losing 1.2R for the day but it seemed like a lot more.

I traded PNRA, JOYG, and AMZN.  JOYG was the most disappointing as I was up 2 or 3 R almost immediately and then stopped out at breakeven late in the day.

PNRA looked good on the 15 minute chart, although the 10:45 bar looked awfully strong in retrospect.  Also, I entered this trade after 11AM which I have to be very careful about.

AMZN didn’t do much all day and I was stopped out quickly.

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I’m taking a quick break from watching the grass grow my positions after I stumbled upon a picture of Howard Lindzon, founder of WallStrip, in ASCII art.  Pretty cool.

Hat tip to Jeremy Zawodny for the link to the ASCII art page.  There might be other stock bloggers that I’m supposed to recognize, but I didn’t notice any after a quick glance.

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After a few days off I was back in the saddle yesterday.  It was a difficult day as the market gapped down hard and the trended up most of the day.  I had a very large number of short candidates today - much larger than normal.

I ended up taking one trade in TXN, which stopped me out pretty quickly.  On another day this might have worked.  I took this trade shortly after 11AM which, as you know, I should be thinking twice (or three or four times) about taking.

Hopefully others were able to make some money today.  It looks like Eyal was able to pull it off.

Here’s the chart:

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I recently started using the full text of each item in the RSS feed for this blog.  I’m going to try it out for a while and see what happens.  There are pros and cons to doing this, but we’ll see what happens.

Also, I’ll be out for a few days as I’ll be traveling.  It looks like I picked a good week to travel since it’s options expiration week (that was purely an accident).  Hope everyone makes a ton of money while I’m gone!

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