The trades I post here will be swing trades. As I post more trades, I will make notes on how I play my average pick, and I will also make notes on how I play certain individual picks. Some trades will be for positions I hold for 1 to 5 days. Some trades will be for positions I will hold upto 6 months. Generally, I like to buy and sell mid afternoon - between 1:30 PM & 3:30 PM EST. I like to go "all in", meaning I risk nearly 100% of my paper money each day. And, I use loose stops. My long term goal is 2.5% (5% with margin) per trading day. However, I am currently content with 1% per day (2% with margin, per year). I shoot for 10% to 20% per return on each stock pick. I will post more details about my system as time goes on. In a day or two, I will post 5 to 10 picks for stocks that will do well for the next few weeks or months. First Disclaimer: As I start this journal, I am not currently trading with real money (I'm still learning my system), and I am not offering investment advice. Additional Disclaimer: All of the examples presented in this post do not imply investment or speculation recommendations or commentary on the prospects of these companies or stocks. The sole purpose of my post is a stock market diary for myself!
All in... loose stops.... certainly easy to do with paper money and call a do over. Not a good way to practice for the real money.
Thank you for your post. As I see it, picking stocks is probably the least challenging part to trading. I expect that money management and dealing with my own psychological weaknesses will be more work then picking good stocks. I am sure time will tell. However, I been working on my stock picking system for several months, and I feel it is time to test it. So, for the next few weeks or months, I will list my picks, and the price at the time of the pick (prices from Google or Yahoo as I do not have a live data feed). Currently, I prefer making my buys or sells between 10:30 am and 3:30 pm. However, some picks will be made after hours to be filed the following morning. When doing after hours picking, I always want to watch the market the following morning to make sure I get an entry I am comfortable with. One other thing, I RARELY get in and out in the same day. So, if you want to loosely check my results, you can use the buy day close price to the sell day close price, and assume a buy at some time near the close of the day.
Here is an example trade from this past week (just to give you a feel for what I am currently doing). On the evening of 11/14, I scanned my watch list and saw that my indicators were saying the ADSK was due a large move. ADSK appeared to have bounced off support, so I went long. If you go Close Price to Close Price, ADSK went from 36.03 on the 15th to 40.99 on the 17th (today). This is a 13.776% increase, not counting trading fees, slippage, margin, or the possility of buying lower during the In Day, or selling higher during the Out Day. In the future, I will post on the In Day and I will post again on the Out Day, and I will try to list the Google Finance price at the time of buy or sell. Again, this journal is log of my quest to make extremely good picks. It is not investment advice in any way, shape or form.
As I mentioned earlier, for record keeping purposes I am going to use the close price of the Buy Day as my in price. When I start trading real money, I expect I will buy some time around midday. However, for now it is easier to just use the close price. MATR @ 30.03 MATK @ 26.06 MCRL @ 11.85 JEF @ 29.55 DELL @ 24.65 EBAY @ 33.15 CBSS @ 57.26 ENTG @ 10.84 ASYT @ 7.03 AMCC @ 3.31 AMD @ 21.41 ATHR @ 23.30 CRUS @ 7.18 KLIC @ 8.23 LU @ 2.62 AKAM @ 50.37 CITP @ 18.99 GTW @ 1.87 ARTG @ 2.42 LNUX @ 4.80 LVLT @ 5.23 PKTR @ 11.59 SAPE @ 5.63 WCC @ 66.85 BRCD @ 8.09 OVTI @ 17.67 PMCS @ 7.87 RFMD @ 7.73 MTSN @ 10.12 SWKS @ 6.98 WFR @ 37.04 DXPE @ 24.47 BCRX @ 12.21 DVSA @ 10.70 AFFX @ 25.87 LMNX @ 13.76 USAP @ 32.42 FLOW @ 12.19 WAB @ 31.13 BLK @ 148.55 FTO @ 29.24 XEC @ 35.22 By the way, I'm participating in one of those online paper trading contest, and here are the stocks I "bought" today. ENTG RFMD AFFX LMNX ATML CRUS OVTI PMCS WFR If I was using real money, I would probably wait for an good opening tomorrow and then try to buy 1 to 3 of these then. Of course, before buying I would first research what the holiday "normally" does to the market action. Here is a list of some things I don't know: 1. How does the holiday effect price/volume? 2. How will the post holiday period be for the market? 3. Will GLW go sideways a while before breaking out? (I picked GLW a few day prior to starting this journal. Now, I am waiting for the breakout.) 4. What do I need to know about trading in December and January? As a side note, my father-in-law was surfing financial websites and found that I have 9 of the top 15 most profitable picks over the past 14 days, on one of the stock portfolio web sites. I started to get a big head, then I realized this must mean that there are only 3 people using that site. In summary, over the next 3 days to 5 months, I will be looking for good exits on this pick list. I want to see what my average profit/loss works out to be. -TraderEO
thats what i was thinkin' as well..whats the freakin' point. do your sim trades in private and come back when u are up and ready to go live.
What's it gonna hurt to have him post this journal here? Maybe it will help him, leave him be. Here's a possibilty~ When you see the post titled "10 TO 20% A MONTH"....... DON'T OPEN IT!!! Just move on to something more interesting to you.
Dude, you need to trade with real money to feel the pain. And try to buy on downs not on any particular day or hour that you like.