In The Beginning...

I just wanted to get my first post over with, just like the first trade I made a week ago... big mistake!

 

Tell us about it!

 

Welcome to ET. I gotta admit, the title drew me in. I thought it would be another "my story" thread or the beginning of a trading novel .

 

Let me elaborate. In the beginning, I bought 200 shares of NERX. The next morning, I was having shakey feelings about the stock, as i had never observed the pre-market in real time before. So I decided to sell it at the cost of commission. I sold with a market order, which resulted in ballooning my 0.4% loss into a 3% loss. How this happened, i'm still not too sure.

Any insight?

 

bought 20 shrs next time.

 

the only time i ever use a market order is when i have to get out in a hurry, thankfully it's not that often, if the stocks not moving away from you in a hurry just place a sell at the bid and you should be ok, unless there's a huge spread. other than that, take a look at your charts what are they telling you?, pre market take a look at the futures, that will give you an idea as to how the market is going to react at the open.

 

I also recently sold a low vol stock (~20,000) and when i put my sell order in at the bid price, the bid price moved down in conjunction with my order, so effectively I was causing myself to chase the price down further.

Is this a figment of my imagination, or does this common with small vol stocks?

 

how many shares were you selling? i won't trade any stocks unless the volume is consistantly over 1mil per day for swing trading and for scalping i won't trade them unless it's 7-10mil a day.

 

I was selling 200 stocks @ appx 10 dollars each.

 

i don't know what stocks you're trading or what the particular situation was, but a little advice, if you're going to swing trade, trade stocks that have at least 500k.