I traded TMA twice and learned my lesson there.  As a result, I missed EOG which yielded a great entry point off the 10 minute bars.  I also missed MF, but traded SEED which went nowhere.

All in all, this was a good day to learn from mistakes (ever the eternal optimist).

Much better day today than yesterday.  Almost 5R, mostly from NFLX.

Speaking of Netflix – if you subscribe to Netflix, use this link to add me to your friends list so we can share movie ideas.  As I mentioned on my Twitter feed a couple days ago, I tend to run out of movie ideas and our queue runs dry.  We’ve got a couple Netflix friends and it’s a great way to generate new ideas – so friend me.

Here are the charts for the day:

They told me there would be days like this.    Nothing seemed to go in the right direction.  Longtime readers of this blog will know my attitude about days like this.  Here’s my mantra: “Whatever trades don’t ruin my account only serve to make me a better trader.”

Here are the charts which looked pretty good at the time.

Not a lot of movers today on my screen.  The day started off pretty much like yesterday – a gap at the open and downtrend the rest of the day until the last half hour.

I took a loss in INTU – I hereby refuse to ever use Quicken again because of this. 

Also, a winning trade in UNFI fell apart and ended up at breakeven.  On a positive note, I’ve been building an ATS – it took a couple trades today and turned a tiny profit.  Woohoo! 

A gap up, followed by a steady downtrend the whole day.  This is definitely the worst type of day to find trending stocks, at least for me.  Luckily I took a couple short trades once the gap was filled that saved the day – lost less than 1R, which is fortunate.  Traded HLTH, RIMM, NTES, NVTL, VDSI.  That’s a lot for me.

I was back in the trading saddle yesterday as I mentioned in my Twitter feed after giving a presentation on trading automation early Monday morning.  I met up with Andy Swan from MyTrade and some other good folks while I was in the big apple.

Yesterday I traded TRAK and CROX.  TRAK worked out pretty well and CROX went in my favor a bit.  Here are the charts:

Here’s a great post by Trembling Hand Trader where he charts his P&L and provides a little technical analysis as if it were a stock chart.

This is absolutely accurate that you can analyze your P&L charts this way. The performance charts that StockTickr provides do this for your automatically.

Another type of chart that would be interesting to look at is your actual account equity. There is no doubt that a lot of traders trade differently when their account value approaches big round numbers with lots of zeros on the end (from either direction), just like many actual stock charts.

Hat tip to John via his Twitter feed.

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Here’s an article that I wrote for the CyberTrader Newsletter a couple months ago:

Have you ever looked back at the end of a trading day and thought “Why in the world did I do that?” Everything seems so obvious at the end of the day, but, of course, traders have to make decisions without the benefit of hindsight. It can be quite helpful to “replay” the day to figure out why you made certain decisions at certain times to determine whether you made mistakes. Taking an honest look at yourself can help you discover ways to improve your trading. Many traders are too quick to sulk about their losses instead of using them for what they are: extremely valuable opportunities for future trading success.
Read the rest of this entry »

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Take a look at the great conversation going on the post on the worse of two trading mistakes.

John Forman (whom we interviewed a while back) makes some excellent points about trading mistakes along with continuing a good metaphor that Eyal started.

My question is:

If you trade according to a plan and never veer from it, are you really a discretionary trader? Or are you your own Automated Trading System? Can you be a discretionary trader with a plan? Just how much wiggle room (read: discretion) is there in your trading plan?

I’ll be giving a talk at this year’s New York Traders’ Expo on Monday, February 18th.  It’s titled “Automation for the Discretionary Trader” and I’ll be pulling from some themes that I’ve written about in the past.  Here’s the description of the talk that’s in the expo brochure:

This session will explore how discretionary traders can use technology to automate much of their trading routine without necessarily automating their actual orders. There are huge benefits to using automation without having a computer actually “pull the trigger” on your trades. Automating your daily trading routine will make you more efficient, allow you to find and trade more opportunities, and give you more confidence in your trading system-all while doing less work. This session will cover various tools and APIs that can be used to let a computer do a surprising amount of your trading grunt work, freeing your time for higher-level pursuits.

I’ll be covering my use of Trade-Ideas as seen in this screencast as well as some of the topics I wrote about in the CyberTrader Newsletter and some other topics that automate my trading routine.

The expo is free to attend, so if you’re close by stop in.  If you’re in New York and want to meet up, drop me a note.

I hope to see you there!

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