It looks like yesterday’s FOMC announcement isn’t helping matters much.  The market looks poised to gap lower at the open today.  My preliminary premarket watchlist contains:

• ADBL
• AMZN
• ARAY
• CDNS

I made one breakeven trade yesterday in HTCH (like Eyal and OONR7).  I got ansy right after the fed announcement and bailed.  I also had a call at 3PM so I knew I would be distracted.  Looks like I should have held to the close. 

Here’s the chart:

There were a few stocks made my watchlist today.  Long: QMAR, ZMH.  Short: ZRAN, VMW, EMC.  I took no trades, but here are some charts that I considered.  I don’t expect things to improve until Thursday, but you never know.

Pretty slow day today – I guess everyone’s waiting for the FOMC announcement tomorrow which will probably make tomorrow’s open sleepy as well.  As I mentioned on Twitter today, no trades materialized in my watchlist today.  Here’s what was on my screens: Long MATR, ACOR and Short: YRCW, MELI.  I almost traded MELI off the 30 minute chart and YRCW looked ok off the 15 minute chart.  I passed on both – looks like they both would have worked for a small gain.

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I took two short trades in TPX today but the market didn’t seem to care too much.  I was stopped out of both of them.  There is a growing mountain of evidence in my StockTickr reports that tells me I should not take trades on days where the market gaps by a large amount at the open.  I’ll devote an entire post to this theory sometime soon.

In the meantime, here are the trades I made today.  First I traded TPX off the 10s:

Then I re-entered later off the 30s:

No such luck either time.  Hopefully you guys made a killing!

It was strange to see a relatively rangebound day in the Qs after all the volatility we’ve had recently.  This seemed like the most uneventful day we’ve seen in a while.  I think this bodes well for my trading and the market in general.

I took a few trades today, but had very little to show for it.  Here’s the charts – they’re not too pretty.  THQI was a mistake and I paid for it.  Very nasty slippage there.

I hope everyone traded well today!

I don’t think anyone could have predicted at, say, 12:40PM ET that the opening gap in the Qs would have been filled by the end of the day.  That was even more impressive than yesterday’s fade.  Look at the vertical blue line in the chart below – could you have predicted what happened afterwards?

I made three trades today, all shorts.  I ended up with a good day, but there was a lot of money left on the table.  That is ok, though.  I know in the long run this strategy will work.

First off, I shorted AAPL.  I took partial profits at 3R and was stopped out at breakeven in the afternoon.

Next was MOT.  I took partial profits at 3R and moved my stop to breakeven.

Last was HGSI, which turned out ok.  It’s too bad this one didn’t hold up a little in the first half hour.

It looks like Mike had the right idea today to try a gap fade.  I hesitate to do those when the gap is SO large.  I gladly sat on my hands today and avoided the temptation to trade.  I went through the motions and created my watchlist and watched AAPL for a while.  I put in a couple orders for SDS but they didn’t trigger.

It was pretty obvious that Bernanke and the fed were sure to prop this market up from the get go.  Was it for the best?  We’ll have to see.

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This feels eerie to me – the entire world’s markets are on the verge of collapse having their worst drop since 9/11 and the US markets are mostly left out in the cold building snowmen on their vacation day.  What will happen tomorrow?  I have no idea, but it’s days like this that remind me why I don’t hold positions overnight.

My advice?  Play tomorrow very cautiously – it’s easy to get all wrapped up in the excitement of extreme volatility.  Just ask yourself – “Am I trading with an edge?”  If you can’t confidently answer yes to that question then the trade you’re about to take is really just a boredom trade on a fast day.

One of the most popular features of StockTickr is the Bulk Import.  Instead of adding your trades manually one at a time, the StockTickr Bulk Import lets you import tons of trades at once using an export file from your broker or trading platform.  Traders like it because it saves a bunch of time and prevents data entry errors.  We’ve recently added support for more platforms:

• MB Trading and any other broker that clears through Penson
• Schwab
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• Create your own CSV file for importing

As the executions go into your journal, StockTickr automatically translates them into actual “trades”.

So for example if you’ve got a list of executions like the following:

Buy 200 AMZN at 91.18 at 9:43AM
Buy 300 AMZN at 91.21 at 9:43AM
Buy 500 AMZN at 91.50 at 9:50AM
Sell 400 AMZN at 91.83 at 9:55AM
Sell 600 AMZN at 91.99 at 10:03AM

StockTickr knows the difference between getting filled for one order at different prices and scaling in or scaling out.  So these executions go into StockTickr as:

Open trade: Long 500 AMZN at 91.20 at 9:43AM
Scale in 500 AMZN at 91.50 at 9:50AM
Scale out 400 AMZN at 91.83 at 9:55AM
Close trade: Sell 600 AMZN at 91.99 at 10:03AM.

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