A great way to finish the month! I made a couple really nice trades today and my patience paid off. I traded RDC and VRTX both long and they both finished strong.
The automated trading system lost 1.5R on one trade. Here were my discretionary trades from today:
Charts automatically generated by StockTickr
Also, I just upgraded to Wordpress 2.5. Nice!
Related Posts:
It took me a while to get into Twitter. I gave it a whirl pretty early on and it seemed more like a fad that would fade. Obviously that’s not the case. I think that when I first started several months ago everyone was still figuring out what to do with it.
Andy from MyTrade has been on board for quite a while and others have as well.
The more I use it the more I’m fascinated by phenomenon and wondering what I did with all my “tweets” before Twitter - I guess they just stayed pent up in my psyche until they reached the “blog post threshold” or I just forgot about them.
Of course, there are those who say that Twitter is irrelevant minutia, but these are kinfolk of the people who dismiss the entire blogosphere because some dude blogs pointlessly about his cat. (Of course there are terrible blogs out there - just don’t read them.)
There are different ways to think about Twitter - replacing quick emails with tweets, a souped-up replacement for the IM status message, real time alerts (I first learned about the BSC $2 buyout on Twitter) - even stock quotes now. It’s certainly all of the above and there’s no doubt there are great uses for Twitter that no one has thought of yet.
If you want to follow my tweets, here’s my Twitter feed. Here are some folks I’m currently following: Brett Steenbarger (from TraderFeed), Howard Lindzon (of WallStrip fame - funny dude), Andy Swan (and his brother Landon), and Fred Wilson (his blog). I’m sure this list will change soon, but this is hitting the high notes now.
Also, if you’re on a mobile phone or BlackBerry, check out TinyTwitter which is a great little app that’s easy on your battery.
Related Posts:
Unlike the previous two days there was at least SOME action for the automated trading system. Unfortunately it didn’t amount to that much. There was one breakeven trade in CCU and one losing trade in CHIC.
I had one discretionary trade that lost an R as well. Here’s that trade in JBL:
Charts automatically generated by StockTickr.
Related Posts:
For the next interview in the StockTickr Interview Series (RSS feed), I spoke with Joshua Hayes, the founder of BigWaveTrading.com and a free service called BigWaveTrading.net.
Read on for more about how Joshua trades, how he got started trading the markets, and the most valuable lesson he learned to improve his trading.
There are several great interviews on the way - have a recommendation for an interviewee? Drop us a line.
Related Posts:
The past couple of days have been quite slow for the automated trading system. This is the way I like it, though. Every time I look to add new systems or methods I make sure that the trade frequency is less than what I envision the final version to be.
It’s sort of like paper trading without the paper. Trade small and relatively infrequently and then slowly give yourself (or the computer) more rope as you determine real world performance.
I took four manual trades today and did pretty well. Here’s the best trade of the day in SKM and the worst trade of the day in WSM:
Charts automatically generated by StockTickr
Related Posts:
I ended up not taking any discretionary trades yesterday. Everything seemed erratic with options expiration occurring.
I did end up giving the automated trading system a little rope and it found two trades to take. One stopped out for a 1R loss, but the other one was a nice 6.5R winner!
Even when you’re trading small 6.5R amounts to something. 
I hope everyone has a good and relaxing holiday weekend!
Related Posts:
One of the beauties of trading is the fact that you can be wrong much of the time and still make money. In fact, of all the trading strategies that make money I wonder what percentage have a win rate of less than 50%? I bet the number is much larger than most novice traders realize.
Anyway, I made 3 trades today and one worked out really well - the others didn’t. My automated trading strategy didn’t make any trades today.
Here are the charts:
Charts automatically generated by StockTickr.
Related Posts:
For the next interview in the StockTickr Interview Series (RSS feed), I spoke with Corey Rosenbloom of the Afraid to Trade blog. Corey has a background in psychology and touches on those topics on his site. Trading psychology is a popular theme in the interview series (see the interviews with Van K. Tharp and Brett Steenbarger).
Read on for more about how Corey trades, how trading is a balancing act, and a couple light-bulb moments for his trading.
(Corey mentions that he’s a TradeStation user - StockTickr has recently added excellent support for TradeStation.)
Related Posts:
I made one discretionary trade today - it was the only gapper in the market that didn’t work out, I think. The ATS took a couple trades as well that turned out to be losers. There are still some kinks I’m working out in the order entry software as well. After the bug I found and the losing trades, I turned it off. Of course, you know what happened next - a couple trades came through that would have been nice winners.
Here’s the chart for the discretionary trade I took today in MDRX:
Chart automatically generated by StockTickr
Related Posts:
I’m still trading small in the ATS, but I’m excited about how things are progressing. I’m in no real hurry to trade bigger with the ATS quite yet, so I’m just continuing to compile slippage stats to measure how profitable this system will be.
Here’s a discretionary trade I took in GS today, which turned out to be a loss.
Related Posts:
