When I saw the big gap up this morning, I almost shut down the trading platform immediately, but I thought I’d wait it out and see how it shaped up. I almost skipped CFC, but decided to go ahead and take it when the Qs started finding support from their early free fall (thanks, Eyal). Nice way to end the week.
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I made almost 3R today mostly off of one trade, ALGN. SYMC only yielded enough for dinner, but not the entire family. ;-) Here are the charts:
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I was short two stocks yesterday: BRCM and ALTR. BRCM came really close to my partial profit target which would have allowed me to walk away with a little bit of money. Instead several Rs worth of profit evaporated into a breakeven day. These reversal days are actually relatively rare - they occur much more infrequently than I would have imagined before we started tracking them on StockTickr.
Here are the charts:
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It’s easy to get all worked up and anxious when the market gaps up like it did today. It was totally fueled by AAPL, which I traded and was stopped out of. These large gaps are actually not good for my style of trading. Here’s the trade:
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For the next interview in the StockTickr Interview Series (RSS feed), I spoke with Teresa Lo, a well known swing trader and founder of PowerSwings.com.
After all the hubbub a while back, I wanted to talk with Teresa directly and make my own determination of her. We had a lengthy conversation and I was impressed with her openness and honesty. We also had a philosophical discussion about R. 
Read on for more about how Teresa Lo trades, how she blew up her account in the early years, and the most common mistakes she sees traders making.
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The market bailed me out of two bad trades on Friday. Those charts are below. Today was a slow but slightly profitable day.
Here’s my trade from today:
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I mentioned earlier that this has been a roller coaster of a month so far for me. Today started out with several candidates to choose from, mostly short. The candidate selection recently has been scarce, so it was nice to have to pick between decent candidates rather than decide whether anything was good enough to trade at all.
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It’s been quite an October so far. It started out kind of tame and then I had three great days in a row. Since then it’s been a steady grind. I’ve only made a couple mistakes, I think, so this sort of thing just goes with the territory. I’ll post some charts after the close.
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How do you make money in the market? As most astute traders realize, it’s not when you buy - it’s when you sell. Early on in my trading, it seemed like I would get stopped out of trades only to see them go in my favor after I had already exited the position. After reviewing my trades, it looked like if I established some better trade management rules I would be able to capture more profits off the trades I was already taking. While I could eyeball my charts for each trade I took, the problem was there was no easy way to see quantitatively how a large number of trades would have worked out had I used a different trade strategy. This is where the StockTickr Stop Analysis Center comes in.
The StockTickr Stop Analysis Center allows you to simulate different trade management strategies on your journaled trades - the trades you actually took.
It allows you to answer questions like the following:
You’ll be able to see how your actual trades would have performed in aggregate using different strategies. You can also run simulations on subsets of your trades using the standard filters in the journal (tags, long or short, profitability, etc.)
The Stop Analysis Center will show you how the simulated strategy performed across each of your trades and gives an aggregate total:
Here’s a chart that shows one of my trades from several months ago that really reinforced the fact that I was moving my stop too soon. The green C indicates where I was stopped out after moving my stop. The green Exit in the corner shows where this trade would have exited had I used a “don’t move my stop for at least 60 minutes” rule. Admittedly this chart is a well chosen example, but this tool has allowed me to see that adding a dose of patience to a large number of my trades would have paid off consistently.
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I took two trades today - one worked out the other didn’t. The one that didn’t work was UCBH. The one that worked quite well was COGN which apparently popped up on Howard’s trend following radar.
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