Sweet

Yesterday I decided to increase my share size to 200. I know it’s not the prudent thing to do, but I figure what the hell. If I get a good run I”ll get to 3k quicker. Luckily for me the trading gods were in my favor. My first trade was ACN, which got me stopped out right away. No biggie, just a 17 dollar loss. My next trade was ENER.

ENER

I got long on the break of the ninth bar risking 38 cents. I figured it would be a losing day, as it usually is when I double up, so I went home satisfied that my loss wouldn’t be as big. When I checked out the stock at around 2, it felt good to see it up almost a dollar. When I looked again at four it felt great. I managed to make 440 on the trade, which was by far my best trade yet. Now my account equity is back up to  800.

I also shorted NVTL which managed to barely make enough to nullify the loss I had with ACN. All in all the week has been good to me. We’ll see how Friday turns out.

When God gives you lemons

Today I fortunately didn’t have the probems that I had yesterday. Everything went smooth and as such I got involved with SEPR.  It wasn’t the prettiest chart, and frankly, I expected to get stopped out. Just goes to show, that I don’t know a damn thing about the market.

SEPR

I got long on the break of the 11:15-11:30 bar. Got filled at 47.88.  The stock was choppy for a while and then went as high as the previous high of 49.20, only to come back down. It wasn’t pretty, but was a much needed $70 dollar profit.

On another note I’ve been looking at Uglychart’s  dummy a day posting.  The key as always is finding those moves on time. I find that sometimes a good way of finding setups is simply waiting till midday and looking for stocks that have the best moves percentage wise. Here are stocks that I found that had made big percentage moves midday.

FDRY

If you had used the 15 min chart, stopped trading at 12:30, and closed your positions on the end of the day you would have made money. Don’t know how often this works, but it’s worth a try, especially for someone that’s just starting out. I’ve been keeping an eye that and the results have  been pretty positive over these past three days. The worse day was today with 2 points per share traded.  Just something to think about.

Opportunity Lost

Yesterday was a horrible day. Not because I lost a lot of money. Simply because I lost a great opportunity to make money. The worse part is that it was out of my control at the moment. My browser at work  wasn’t loading certain sites. One of them happened to be www.prophet.net, where I scan for my stocks for the day. Well, of course the day something like that happens is the day you miss great opportunities.  Yesterday my candidates were EYE and CECO.

EYE

Look at that beautiful shorting opportunity at 40.43. Even if  I did get filled ten to fifteen cents away, that could have easily been 1.60 in my pocket.

I seem to be less enthusiastic to post whenever days like this and losing days happen. I guess it’s because I’m still negative overall.  That’s a situation I’m looking to address by stepping up my size sooner. I know it doesn’t make any sense but at this point I don’t care. I’m tired of getting excited over having a $144 dollar day.  Right now my account is at $292. Let’s see  how soon I can get it to $3000.

Watching paint dry

That’s what I’ve been doing since Thursday. No trades on Friday, and even though Altria was enticing, I didn’t get involved with that stock either. Good thing I didn’t because I probably would have gotten stopped out only to see it tank in the last hour. One trade I did take last week where I got sotpped out but got in again to get some profits was WAG

WAG

I got short on the break of the 6th bar, only to get stopped out by one cent. I got short again on the break of the bar that stopped me out. Net, it only gave me about 36 dollars.

My account has taken strong hits these last few weeks so I think my trading will be a bit less. If I had traded the way I normally do I would have gotten stopped a few times on CCJ today. I expect things to get good because when things are going bad, the good times are just around the corner.

And I thought August was bad

The title says everything. Right now I am longing for the choppy weeks of August. This month has been miserable for me. Between today and yesterday I managed to lose another $114. This is almost reminding me of the days I would spend weeks without a winning trade. I expected by this point to be able to increase my size to 200 shares. I’m pretty much back where I started last month. This sucks. My losers were KMX, twice and CC, both longs on a positive day. Go figure. I also got stopped out on the GBP/USD short, but that was my fault because I got in right before the Fed announcement. I”ll probably be shorting it again though. Tomorrow hopefully will be a better day.

Random stuff

I just found this to be slightly amusing. Right now I’m long KMX at 43.77. I’m also short GBP/USD at 1.8809.

Slow and Steady

I’ve finally managed to stop the bleeding today. Didn’t trade much since I didn’t get many stocks to show up on my radar. To be honest, the only thing that popped up was FDC. It didn’t move as much as I hoped, but a move is a move, so I can’t really complain.

FDC:

I got short on the break of the 7th bar. Got filled at 41.93 and I held till the end of the day for $65 profit. Feels good to get back on the winning track. I don’t think my account can take the onslaught it took last week.

This weekend I had a conversation with one of my friends about the market who happens to be a stockbroker. I’m sure you traders out there have had this type of conversation.

Friend: So how did you do last week?
Me: I got raped
Friend: Did you see Ford last friday?
Me: No, it didn’t show up on my scanners.
Friend: You should have shorted a big position in that stock .
Me: If I knew it was going to go down, that’s exactly what I would have done.
Friend: Even I knew it was going to go down. It was DOWNGRADED. I don’t get it, trading is so easy. I don’t think it’s that serious.

I can’t wait to make money and tell him ,”yea, it is easy.”

Smoked

This is what we say when one of the traders get long a stock and the specialist starts to print a dollar below from where they got long, and you just can’t get out of the stock. That didn’t exactly happen to me but when you lose $144 , which is the equivalent of 5.5Zs, that’s what it feels like. So the drawdown went down to about $400 and change. I’m just happy it didn’t happen when that’s all I had in my account. Even though a few days ago I said I wouldn’t tweak anything, that’s exactly what I did on Friday and I missed something like this:

FMD

There was an entry on the 8th bar. Of course I would have gottent stopped out, but my persistance would have paid off on the 11th bar. Net woulda coulda shoulda been about $200 dollars on that trade alone. Sure, with all the volume going on Friday I woulda gotten into a few more losing stock situations, but the loss wouldn’t have been as great. Oh well, it really is pointless talking about the hypothetical. I’m going to go back to my old scan as far as more than average volume is concerned because it gives me less candidates.  I will also increase the liquidity from 350k shares. I think 750k is a respectable amount.  We’ll see. In the future I will make an effort to post some losers. Actually I will post one which stands out because I was stopped out by one cent, which is totally my fault.

CBH

I got long on the break of the 12:15 bar. My stop was at 35.11. If you notice the next bar is an outside bar. Now, I usually don’t move the stop below the outside bar, even though it’s a more logical stop. However, in this case, it was just one cent lower than my initial stop. I think I could have made the exception. That stop out was the difference between me losing $144 and losing $68.  To me the latter is  a whatever loss, but the former falls more into the category of devastating.

Now all I can do is patiently wait.

I know this has nothing to do with this post but I’ve bene papertrading another strategy on spot  Forex over the past two weeks. I’m up 929 pips and right now I’m short the USD/CAD. I made the fake money by shorting the GBP/USD and longing the USD/YEN.

I need to stop rambling on these posts. Did anybody catch NYX? Anywho,  I hope everybody traded well and good luck next week.

Another one bites the dust

Yesterday was another losing day (-$37), so i wasn’t too enthused about posting. I’ve been reading comments about posting losing trades. One of the reasons is so that we can all figure out what went wrong with the trade. Now, when I post, it’s mostly to illustrate a point. The point is that the system works. I want to inspire confidence into anybody that reads the blog. I don’t want people to sit down and overanalyze the trade.

This is what I fear will happen if I start posting the losers. These setups, don’t work all the time. I forget where it was that I read about this guy, Thomas Bulkowski I believe his name is, where he has stats on different formations, and his highest ranking one worked about 48% of the time. Just because I don’t post the losers doesn’t mean I don’t look at them myself.

As such, what I have realized so far is that I don’t like this drawdown. I”m sure nobody does, but it’s not the actualy drawdown that’s annoying. It’s the swings as we wannabe poker players would explain it. I don’t mind losing. It’s part of the game. But I would rather make 600 one day, and lose 100 the next, instead of making 1000 one day and losing 500 the next.  So I was looking at the trades I’ve recorded and paying attention to the big winners (1 dollar or more). Of the 15 I’ve had, only two of them had average volumes of less than 1M shares. Over the same time frame, if I had not traded shares with less than 1M volume, I would have had almost the same net P&L. The greatest differences  are  the Risk expectancy (1.52 to .91), the trades (62-111),  the profit factor (3.66 to 2.35, and the drawdown($50.80 to $258). I know this can just be a coincidence, but if the numbers are so much better as far as variance is concerned, but the end result is the same, then I would feel much more comfortable with the 1M share trades. It would also allow me to risk a bit more. Of course this is all premature so I’ll be keeping on eye on it for now. Today there should be lots of false candidates because of quadruple witching so watch out and best of luck in your trades.

Drawdown rears its ugly head

Just when I thought August sucked, this week had to come along. Between today and yesterday I’ve suffered my worst drawdown so far losing $218 after fees. I got into mostly longs. My candidates were PLL, stopped out twice, ENER, stopped out in the afternoon only to watch it close up from where I got in, and BGG, which gave me a whopping five cents. I shorted SMG but that did absolutely nothing to help the cause. This week my winning percentage has been way down and it shows  with the results. The good thing is that all it takes is one $200 dollar day to be back in the black for the month. I’m not posting any charts because frankly, no one wants to see charts of losers.

So what do I have to change in my system? Nada. Nothing. Zilch. Niet. This is where people start looking at the flaws in their trading system and start tweaking it. These are the moments in which people give up and start trading something else. This system isn’t the holy grail. Continuously monitoring your risk and remaining disciplined is. Just another annoying minor setback on my quest to increase my position size. I was curious though as to how big a drawdown this system will take. It gives me a better idea as to when I should increase positions and what to expect in the worst case scenario. I’ve never gotten more than two losing consecutive days so we’ll see what the market brings tomorrow.