I made just one trade today – stopped out at breakeven in OTEX.  Really boring day – good day to shutdown the trading platform early which is just what I did.

I hope everyone has a good holiday break!

The markets seemed quite dicey today with a gap down and then very strong bars to start off with.  It always makes it difficult to gauge market sentiment when the market opens like this.  It’s days like this that make me glad that I mostly ignore the overall market action.

I know a lot of traders worry about the overall market and which way it seems to be leaning and trade accordingly.  Unless the market trend is completely obvious, I mostly ignore it and simply take the setups that I see.  I used to watch indicators to try to gauge the market, but I found I almost always either overtraded or undertraded when I did that.  If the market seemed to be trending up, I would feel like I needed to get on board and would overtrade.  If I saw a perfectly good setup that seemed to be contrary to market action I would ignore it only to see it turn into what would have been a great trade.

Perhaps I could squeeze another R or two out of my system if I did things differently, but I’m perfectly content at this point letting the market do what it wants – I’m just watching for setups.  I’ll repeat, though, that when the overall market trend is completely obvious, that will weigh into my decision, but less than you probably think.

I’d like to hear how other traders handle overall market action as it pertains to trading their setups.

On to my one trade today.  It was a boring day, really.  Only two setups that even had a chance to materialize: SIGM and CWTR.  I halfheartedly traded CWTR and it turned out well (almost 3R).  I entered off the 10 minute charts which I’m becoming more and more comfortable with.  Hope you had a good day!

I traded two stocks today, SMTC and BIG.  With the uptrend in the Qs today, you would think going long on two trades would’ve been great, but not so.  I ended up with enough change to buy a dinner, this time for most of the family. 

Stopped out of SMTC for -1R.

1.26R in BIG today.

I only saw one trade worth taking today.  It was in WINN and turned out to be, well, a winner. 

It looked like a great setup to me – two dojis followed by a bearish mostly shaven bar then an inverted hammer on the opening range low.  I scaled out half of the position at the Fibonacci extension and trailed a stop the rest of the way for about 3.3R.  Hopefully there will be more candidates tomorrow that work like this one did!

Do you ever have one of those days where everything you touch just turns to gold?  Where the wind is always at your back?  Where you can do no wrong?  They are great, aren’t they?

Well, today was not one of those days for me. 

I lost 2R in two trades.  Just another day at the office.

Here’s the charts:

Let’s see, the market gapped up and closed near its highs, 3 of my 4 trades were long, and I was stopped out of two of them.  Go figure.  This was my best day ever in terms of dollars in profit.

I traded BCSI (like everyone else, I’m sure) for 4.5R, AAPL (-1R), BYI (-1R), and TWB (short for 2.3R).  All trades were in before 10:45AM which is a good thing.  August was looking pretty ugly before today.

Do you use Real Tick or MB Trading as your broker?  If so, we’d love to have you test out the StockTickr plugin that we created that supports these two brokers.  You’ll get an extended free trial to StockTickr and a very significant discount off the standard subscription rate.

The StockTickr Plugin does the following:

• Automated Record Keeping – the plugin pulls your executions from your trading platform and inserts them into your StockTickr Trading Journal
• Trade Type Recognition – the plugin automatically determines the type of trade you made – buy, sell, scale in, scale out, sell short, or buy to cover.
• Intelligent Default Stops – the plugin uses an algorithm to determine a default stop based on recent trades in your journal.  Of course, you can override the suggested value.
• Duplicate Trade Avoidance – the plugin queries your journal and avoids entering duplicate trades.  This allows you to run the plugin more than once a day.
• Default Tags – you can customize the default tags that are applied to each trade in your journal.
• StockTickr Chart Review – StockTickr will generate charts for all your trades with your entry and exit points plotted right on the chart.
• Saves You A Lot of Time – you know how important keeping a trading journal and capturing charts of all your trades is – StockTickr does this for you automatically!

The StockTickr Plugin for Real Tick adds the following feature:

• Optionally enter your entire trading history, not just the most recent day’s trades.

If you’re interested in testing these plugins for us with Real Tick or MB Trading, use the contact form and select Beta Program from the drop down.  Include which broker you use and a brief description about yourself and we’ll send you the links for the plugins.

I haven’t been trading much over the past few days.  There aren’t a lot of gappers for me to choose from.  I did take a couple of trades today and like Eyal yesterday made some lunch money, although not for the whole family.

I traded ASN for 1R.  This one was a shame, too.  It almost immediately went in my favor and for a few seconds I was sitting on 4R in profit.  I’ll need to work in some type of profit taking rule to capture some of that – it was less than breakeven for a while there.

I traded BIDU off a hammer on the OR high on the 15 minute chart.  I should have trusted my instincts which told me to be wary since there was very little if any gap from yesterday.

Now that’s what I call a reversal day.  I was short 4 stocks and only one worked out.  Just under breakeven for the day.  Nothing much more to say – you can look at the charts if you’d like.

Nice downtrend today, was short two stocks and…  I lost money.  Not much, but a little.

Overall a boring day.  There were very few candidates this morning and none of them would have worked without me bending my rules to get in them.

I traded ORBC and WMT.  ORBC stopped me out almost immediately and WMT dragged on and on the whole day and I turned tiny profit on it.