When it rises/drops a lot! Lol. I prefer to see it going parabolic or cascading. Sometimes you can see sellers or buyers on Level II. A lot of it is feel and it depends on the situation.
Today's Results...-897.10 (made a mistake on first post) Trying to do too much when there isn't much to do. Glad the month's over and I'm up a little bit and I can start fresh tomorrow. I'll be cutting my size down to start next month from scratch. I'm watching baseball for the rest of the day. Go Yankees!
Electric Thanks for sharing your rationale on the SBUX play from a few days back. It was educational for me. Hang in there..you know what you are capable of doing. Remember never to compare yourself to others..either you come up short and feel bad and "press"...definitely not what you want to do! Or you come up better and feel a sense of superiority that only can lead to a fall...you are your best opponent and there is never anything wrong with feeling good about doing better than you did yesterday!
Starting today, I'm going to begin posting my true total daily results. This means I'll include the results of my automated and discretionary trading. I'll continue to cover my discretionary intraday trades. Friday results: +$4798.58 No great reason to get excited...that includes my discretionary -$900 for the day. Pussyfooted around great trade opportunities in BLK and GENZ at the close on Friday. Made a little in GENZ and totally played BLK the wrong way. Today's results: +$1782.70 I only made one trade today as I was working most of the day on a new system. I shorted RIMM. 95% of my day's profits are from automated trading. Other thoughts: Excellence is a habit. Simple phrase but it hit home for me and brought my last few weeks into perspective relative to the weeks prior to the downslope I've been on for last 2 weeks. I stopped working out regularly when my friend came into town. I stopped getting to the office on time to prepare when my friend came into town. My sleeping patterns were poor after my friend left town. No coincidence that my discipline in my trading has waned as the routine/discipline in my daily life has waned. The healthy lunches that I routinely prepare have also waned. My nightly preparation also waned. There's an inextricable link here. My sports performance/trading shrink hammered home the importance of routine to a trader to me a few weeks back and I look at my life over the past few weeks and I see how I've neglected this important advice. I see how routine & the lack of routine in my daily life has been reflected in my trading life. I'm getting back on the horse and heading to the gym after I finish this post. I restarted my healthy breakfast/lunch routine today (well lunch at least). Cheers to getting back on the right track. Good luck to all.
ElecEquity, great journal! If you don't mind sharing, what software are you using for your automated trades? And how many trades does the automated strategy execute a day?
Thanks. I''m glad you like it. My firm's software is built in-house. It's gotten a lot better, but it still has much to improve upon. As far as trades/day, it depends on the day. I don't have access to today's results anymore but on Friday..#1 traded 98,400 shares and #2 traded 105,000 shares...today was pretty slow so I would guess that it traded quite a bit less.
Today's total results: +$4260.24 Discretionary trading: +$735.63 (this is included in total results) Didn't play any fades today. All trades went with the prevailing trend. Still holding some LULU overnight as of now. Really didn't trade very much b/c of 2 reasons: (1) I'm refining my intraday/overnight discretionary trend trading approach and (2) I'm focusing on not overtrading and forcing trades right now. Biggest winners LULU (still open) entry @91.68 CAVM +535.81 ANF +409.16 Biggest losers NFLX -438.32 AMZN -105.64 3 other small losers total Thoughts on the day: My automated is performing well right now, but I've seen this ball game before many times. It has down days and they will come -- hopefully later than sooner...anyone with automated knows the drill. That's why I generally don't pay much attention to it intraday or daily...just weekly. Market seems like it's set up to continue higher. SPY has some support around 132.83. We'll see if it holds. The afternoon selloff wasn't a great sign..but in the big picture of things, it's no big deal as long as the most recent support levels at 132.83 and 130.44 continue to hold. I do wonder if the market is possibly heading lower though after watching the action in AAPL over the past few days OR maybe AAPL just isn't a leader anymore...but there haven't been very many recent market rallies that AAPL hasn't participated in -- just something to keep in mind.