Opening range trades are statistically the most profitable: not to take advantage of the volatility present @open is just plain silly: r/r soon after the bell is at the highest and if u manage your trades well, getting rid of losses quick and letting profits to run, u'll be very profitable. Care must be placed on choosing the right stocks and the perfect moment to enter and get out: u have to look for stocks that are affected by important news, like earnings, upgrade/downgrades, mergers/acquisitions. It's no difficult to find them; look at bloomie most active and most up/down, those stocks are always news related and offer plenty of volatility and liquidity. Play the gaps and study the time frames where the stock is more likely to retrace (if it does) and get in with a tight stop, keep an eye on the futures and try to understand if it is a choppy day or a trend day; discerning this will help u decide if it's wise to let the trade run 'till 2:00EST/close or to book profit after a few min.
Yeah, I tried to make a case for trading the open since I registered here. Everyone should have realized that before they even started trading; big movers are in front of u every single day: stalk them and try to understand the best way to take advantage of these large percentage gains, they are there for the taking.
I agree with you. People have to realize that competition is much tougher in stocks like GOOG or AAPL than in those stocks that are out of the spotlight. The best specialists and market makers are in these stocks, you also have to add that Merrill and Goldman also put their best traders here, you are also competing against hedge funds, mutual funds and computer programs that when triggered play tricky games on these stocks. There are hundreds of stocks that move in a more orderly way with enough volatility and liquidity from which you can make a living from. The old NYSE provides lots of opportunities.
the problem with the nyse is once a stock upturns fills are tougher and when looking for shorts nyse is impossible to short once they downturn. no doubt the nyse stocks trend much smoother either long or short once the direction is in. for instance the other day when unh approached 60 i threw in 10 different price scaled shorts and never got one fill in 2minutes so i cancelled. it fell fast to $59.40 or so. with naz immediated fills when they're falling
Just remember it will happen again while the market will try to convince you otherwise and undo the learning curve. What are you gonna do to stop it from EVER happening again? Do you reward yourself for doing the hard thing?
I think the reward is knowing that you did the right thing regardless of the eventual outcome. A week or so ago I had Call 720/730 credit spreads on RUT. When RUT got to ~ 705 I bot them back for a small loss. The index got up to 716 recently and expired at 705. If I had held on I would have made $, but the right thing to do was avoid a major loss and take the small one. I made up for the loss with my RUT Put spreads. I don't feel bad because I followed my plan. Took small losses when my position was threatened; live to trade another day.
Agree. I would do something to reward myself regardless P/L... open up a can of Coke (soda) and some good food... a small celebration. That does magic to reenforce good trading.
Well tomorrow is monday and i have gathered courage to trade and have learnt a lot from this weekend as i was very down Hope full i know monday will also be a tuff day so have to becarefull and try to be patience and small trade,s
You also need to find some new, less active stocks, so that you can learn the dynamics of how stocks trade. I suggest looking for stocks that trade btw 200,000-800,000 shares a day. It wont be as action packed as watching AAPL, but you need to learn HOW to trade first before attempting to trade the faster movers. Believe me, its better to spend 3 months or so learning the slower movers before graduating on to the more advanced stocks.