Accountant.... I am trying to understand your methodology. Can you explain why you are short at that closing price? Also, can you explain why your stop loss is 15 cents away, yet your target is only 13 cents away? What is the basis for your stop loss? Is it a fixed 1.5% stop or is there a structural, price based reason for it? Thanks and best regards.
Alright, my new method is to short at the close when the price at the close is less than the pivot point for the following day. In this case the pivot for VC tomorrow is 9.79 and the close of yesterday was 9.69, so I placed a short order at the close but I got filled at 9.67, no sweat. I backtested this for the year of 2005 and it was successful for more than a 1% gain 80% of the time. The 20% losses however were sometimes 3-5%. I wanted to reduce the losses but didn't want to prevent myself from picking up a gain. So I had to test first the winning trades and how far away the price moved away from my purchase price (if buying at the close). With the winning trades there were only a few times where the price moved against me more than 15 cents (7/63), so those became losses of 15 cents. The average price move away from my purchase price on a winning trade using this strategy was only 5 cents, so thats something worth looking at as well. I also looked at the losses and the average price move away from my purchase price for losses was 26 cents. So with winners average price move so low and the losers price move 5 times the average of the winners I knew I had to set a stop loss to prevent the losers from getting too big. So then I took the winning trades and figured out what was the average gain. Turns out the average gain was 24 cents. So how did I come up with 13 Cents for today? Well I looked at all the winners and tried to see what was the most common lowest gain (being as conservative as possible) and it was 13 cents. There are many gains above 13 cents so it is definately possible, but for today when the stock reaches 13 cents I will be watching it like a hawk to capture that gain or watch it get larger. Reducing my losses to 15 cents and making some winners 15 cent losers (because I would have been stopped out) gave the following outcome: Average Gain: 3.28% Average Loss: 1.68% Winning %: 72.84% Max Gain: 8.96% Max Loss: 2.63% The last number is the most important one I wanted out of this testing. I want to make sure I don't suffer a huge one time loss like I had in september, twice. So I have an average win/loss ratio of 2:1 and a 72% chance of success. This was a strategy I was willing to take on. I will post all my trades with this strategy in this thread from now on. Before I kind of had haphazard trades and wasn't good about posting them. If you would like to see the spreadsheet for this strategy pm me and I'll email it to you, I don't want to post it to the site. Accountant
Acctant, Good summary and analysis. Regardless if you are positive or negative at the end of month, you have the right attitude and are evaluating your mistakes properly. We all have to adjust strategies to fit our personalities, and it seems your latest stride towards profitability is a step in the right direction. Good luck in October.
Stock opened up and immediately declined. I rode it all the way to $9.35 and decided to put a .15 trailing stop on it to secure a $.17 gain per share in case it were to go up. It continued down to $9.26 then shot up and I got filled by my broker at $9.43 for a $.24 gain. Hmmm there's that average gain #. Anyway so I made 2.55% today. I am happy. Of course the stock will probably go down more today, but I'm happy with 2.5%. We'll see what it does by the end of the day today for my afternoon trade.
Covered 1000 Shares of VC at 8.95 for a 16 cent gain, or 1.79%. At the close today sold short 1050 shares of VC at $9/sh. Working so far. It will be great to have a $500 week. Accountant
Made a huge mistake today. Had it easy all morning when VC was declining, it started to flaten off at 8.80, this became support and I should have been aware of this and covered. but I was stupid and thought it would come back down some more, and it just kept going up. I ended up covering towards the close and was partially filled which also pissed me off 150 shares at 9.03, and 900 shares at 9.07. Note, always wait until the very end of the close, the stock went down to 9.01 by the close and I could have got a better price. Lost about .71% today, which isn't bad if it should have been a loss, but this should have been a win of about 2%. Here is how I did on the week though: Gross Revenue: $314.50 Interest Income: $- Less Commissions: $(49.00) Less Fees : $(1.17) Less Interest Exp.: $(3.60) Total Profit/(loss): $264.33 That's a gain of 5.65% from my starting cash value. Not holding a short position over the weekend since VC should be due to go long on monday. Accountant
First trade since last week. Sold short 1200 shares of VC at the close yesterday for 7.87. I missed the huge drop it had today down to 7.61 and now I'm still holding while its treading at 8, hopefully my stop doesn't kick in and this thing goes down today. I'll update once I cover or hold another night. Accountant
Technicals mean nothing to me, I'm a statistical/strategy trader. If it doesn't work out my stop is hit and I move on to another day. Still holding onto VC. Stop is at 8.03, It can't get jumpy in the morning. Accountant