ABIO treated me good on my first day of live trading. Honestly, I just hoped to make $20 or $30 my first day playing with real money. I have done well paper trading, but this was for real, and by anybody's standards I was not ready to go live yet, and I knew it, but I figured I still had a better chance of walking out winners than at the casino. Entered at $6.50, 100 shares, with stop at $6.40. Price fluttered around a bit with interesting volume levels and I decided to let it either stop out at $6.40 for a $10 loss, or let it run cause it looked like it would. When it took off at about 10:22 I moved my stop up to $7.50, watched it make a high at $8.99 and fall more than I was comfortable with, so I sold where it crossed EMA9 at $8.55. I had lunch and felt really triumphant about the morning, but I was idly watching ABIO some more when at about 1310 it started going up again. Bought back in, 200 shares this time, at $8.47 with a stop at $8.25 and almost sold out again when once more it touched a whisker to the EMA9, but held out for full body contact, and glad I did. It took off again and made a high of $12.83 and I got out of it at $11.90 for a day's profit before expenses of $891 and my nads must weight ten pounds right now. I know it won't be like this all the time and this was a rare perfect stock to play, but I think I did all the right moves and made enough today to make up for the next few trading days being sucky. At least I paid for all the "how to become a jillionaire in 3 weeks of daytrading" books I bought. I kinda wish I had gone in a little deeper than 100 and 200 shares, but everything I have read and been warned about risk management kept me a bit antsy so I missed out on a big massacre but still made a nice kill with never more than $1700 cash on the table at any one time. Now I can only make one more trade at the most in the next 5 days so I guess I will do some more reading instead. Nothing but praise for tradingview.com's web screener. Still on my free trial, and it put me right on the nuts this morning. I am still figuring out where to put all my filters but so far I think I like it a lot more than Trade Ideas. I am strictly a Linux user so either one could be the one, if they were first up with a Linux app. Meanwhile I am stuck with webware for a lot of things having to do with trading. I have been mostly using one minute candles on my paper trading, sometimes referring back to 5 minute candles just for a different perspective. I started the day at one minute, and never took the time to switch back and forth. Looking back, I think this was not a good stock or a good day for 5 minute candles. I know five minute intervals are widely recommended for beginners but I just feel like I miss out a lot. Oh, and I watch the price ticker, too. I like watching it jump around and I know every twitch is somebody else buying and somebody else selling. It kinda makes it real for me, somehow. Plus I get an early clue about a move almost before it happens. I think it helped a lot that there was just so darn much volume flying around in this stock today. Only one time was I disappointed in how much the price fell off before I could get a sell order in, and in the big scheme of things, with this little stock rollercoastering up and down, it wasn't so bad. I am seriously watching for illiquidity to be my arch enemy. A lot of stocks that get screened up due to high volatility, simply don't have much actual volume. Talking under $10 stuff. Stuff with so little volume that if you go in at 1000 shares, it's like you are trying to play poker but nobody else will sit down and play with you. Liquidity isn't an issue trading for funsies cause you don't have to worry about an order executing in a timely manner. For keepers, yeah, that's one of the two things that scare me a little. The other thing comes from my poker playing. There are some very tough players out there who take the game dead serious and have survived long enough to be very formidable opponents. I think a lot of beginning players, er, excuse me, I mean "traders", don't TRULY realize that they even have opponents out there who are genuinely trying specifically to take their money. They think they are just out trying to beat a virtual market, almost like playing a video game, but they are really just food, and the sharks are circling. When you think of it that way, a lot of things start to make sense, about trading. I still do NOT think it is strictly a zero sum game. You are gonna win more longs in a bull market and more shorts in a bear market. Some of the ebb and flow is caused by fresh investor money coming and going. But the heavy hitters are still gonna eat a certain portion of the little guys for lunch, and mostly the little guys are not going to even be aware of it until suddenly they are broke. Every time I have done well paper trading, it was on a pharm or medical stock. I think I am going to concentrate heavily on them for now. Crap. I should have kept watching that stock, cause there was a lot more action available to me... I probably would have gone in with 400 shares the next rally. And then I would have missed out on a monster, in the last hour of trading, due to the PDT rule. Anybody else trade this one today? I bet somebody here with more brains and money than me crushed it. God Bless EMA9, NASDAQ, and whatever wonder drug ABIO is peddling today.
Congrats, GrowleyMonster! That’s anwesome to hear how your first time live trading went. I can tell by the way you wrote this... you still had a rising heartbeat and the blood was pumping! I know it’s exciting, but you need to calm yourself lol. The feeling of “your nads gaining 10 pounds” or being as high as the sky can lead you into a great fall. I say this because you went on about wishing you did x,y, and z. Why wish when you know what’s works. Your position size and capital works for a first time trade. Again, I harp on the get away from wishing because it can lead you on a bad path. Make sure you stick to your strategy and risk management even when your “nads” feel like they’re 100 pounds on a winning trade. Just some advice going forward. Don’t get too caught up in wins and loses. Learn what worked and what didn’t. You can turn inconsistencies and mistakes into lessons which is a valuable aspect of trading. Congrats, again, on the winning trade! SinBin
Just checking, assuming account sub 25K as worrying about PDT rule right ?? You realise, you haven't got 3 day trades in and out in 1 day before you get put on hold first time, then margin lost 2nd time pretty much, it's 3 trades in 5 days, so you can't day trade any more for the next 4 days. Can't remember exact rules, think its 3 trades allowed in a rolling 5 day period. Careful!!
To the OP: You got in a a very low-float issue that traded about 22X the float. The float is around 1 million shares, and something like 22 million plus traded today on news. Enjoy it, next time is unlikely to be as easy.
Yeah I know. I can do one more and that's it for a week. I won't bother. I got a ton of books to read. And projects to do in the shop and on the boats and the house etc. I will just wait a week and start with a blank slate. Later this year I can fully fund the account and hopefully have some extra for a cushion.
Yeah I know. I couldn't believe how that one was moving. I won't have another trading day until next week. I honestly would be delighted to just post a tiny profit and not a loss, TBH. I might do some paper trades tomorrow if I get bored or if I get some ideas or read some interesting stuff.
Keeping my account details to myself for the moment. But there are only two, unless you go with webware. Only TOS and TWS support Linux AFAIK. I may post a screenshot or two if I get a day like that again. But I'll give you this... TradingView helped me find the stock. I selected the "Unusual Volume" screen, changed a few filters a bit, then sorted by the volatility column and eliminated anything under $5 and ABIO was top of the list. Went to the full chart and it looked like a possibility as a major stock in play before the market. Not long after the opening, I decided I could play that one with a pretty good risk/reward ratio just by setting a tight stop. Little did I dream. I got about 7 weeks before I have to go back to work. I am gonna be looking at TradingView every weekday morning and probably every evening too. Trade Ideas, I am just not feeling the love for, at least not yet.