You're welcome. We can all learn something. It may have been you (i'm new here and "not good at faces") who said they were surprised that they could understand my complicated post about the health physics stuff. Anway, what i found when at work, is that being able to explain things to people is often the only way to get funding and be able to do the work we want to do. Those "bean counters" in Washington we had to please may have their Ph.D.s, but you might very well be smarter than most of them. Thank You so much for going over those charts to pick entry points based on chart theory! That stuff is way over my head, but we all have our specialties. But back to business ... QUESTION: By "position at the open (assuming $1.86)" do you mean with a market order or a limit order? No. I think you're suggesting a stop buy order. I could use what they call a Trade Trigger, where a specified last sale price, or even equalling or exceeding a certain bid or ask, any one of them could be used to trigger either a market order or a limit order ... or a stop limit order. So i could have the Trade Trigger be used to enter a stop limit order (so that would essentially be a stop limit order with 3 specified price points, not the usual 2 price points of a stop limit order). I need to put my limit orders in for the open and right now my highest one is at $1.90. They range all the way down to $1.50 right now. I'm a bottom feeder, not a momo player. So it's just not my style to use stop buy orders. If it opens at over $1.90 and stays higher than $1.90, as it stands now i won't have a single share. I'm going with 10-cent even increments (not odd #s) because the big traders have software that spits out 100-200 share orders faster than a machine gun, and they don't have to enter their orders on Sunday, so i get to be the "order ahead." But ... when it comes to first-come first-served, my orders will get filled before theirs when the price reaches the $1.90, $1.80, etc. "hug points" where prices often "stick to." If, say, only 1000 shares trade at as low as $1.70 tomorrow and my buy order was entered first, then i get those shares. I have plenty of cash for these buys as long as they're held for T+3. And i don't mind what is called "averaging down" despite the bad rep it has. I realize that if this takes off with an up-gap of more than 4 cents and keeps on going up, i won't have any shares Monday. But my thinking is that if it DOES do that, it will (off the top of my head) have that RSI >= 90 which gave that sell signal on CBLI last Wednesday ... meaning that So ... the scenario you mentioned as "If it breaks through the Friday high of 1.98, 2.25 should be easy" .... Pray Tell ... exactly what order would you suggest i enter? Again, i don't mind buying tomorrow's shares at any and all of the even price points between $1.50 and $1.90. What i'm not prepared for is it gapping up higher than $1.90 on the open and keep going. I could in a stop-buy order that is triggered to become a market buy only if the last sale EXCEEDS a certain price or percentage GAIN. It seems you are suggesting such a thing. I'm rambling. If i wanted to guarantee getting a "good average price" tomorrow for a minimum of 1000 shares, what type of stop buy order would you suggest ... based on the chart, of course. But i have a hard time with buying simply because it's running up, because such a run would raise the chance of a retrace. I'm comfortable with the orders i have now where i'll have at least shares bought at $1.90 or lower as long as someone hits my $1.90 bid (if $1.90 is the day's low). Otherwise i'll have no shares. I think you should understand my dilemma. If it races away at the open, then it's my trading style to wait for a pull-back and not chase it while it's going up. I like to buy cheap, not expensive. Arggh!!! This is the American Stock Exchange, not the NASDAQ. If it gaps up for the open, i want a piece of it (within reason, that is). SO. I think i will be adding a new limit order to buy @ $2.00 or better. I'm not sure if limit orders on the AmEx get filled at the opening price like they do on the NASDAQ. Do you know? So .. say i put in that order to buy limit $2.00, if it opens unchanged at $1.86, i will be immediately buying 2000 shares by filling the $1.90 and the $2.00 limit orders. If it takes off from there i have 2000 shares and it's something. But if it falters, my average purchase price is being decreased as those successive limit orders get filled. Naah. I simply WILL NOT pay more than $2.00. So that is my game plan. I'm adding another buy, limit $2.00 for your scenario of a runaway to the upside at the open. Given all the see-sawing Friday did not end with a flatline. They were still duking it out. It just goes way against my grain as a bottom feeder to pay more than $2.00 for any shares of COR. So, please don't think of a stop buy strategy to handle the runaway opening up-gap. If that happens, i'll watch the tape and hope for a pullback. Anyway, if COR takes off as we seem to expect, this discussion will get wider interest if it has its own thread at ET, so i started a new one under Stocks: http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=87961 BBF
BBF - You are absolutely correct - any run above an entry point of $2 would be a day-trade or very short-term swing trade for me (1 week tops). If you are in for the long haul, which I think you are (long - meaning summer for FDA ruling), I wouldn't buy at that level. It is also very impressive that you have identified your trading style and have the stick-to-it-ness to stay with it. That is something I struggle with on a regular basis.
aw shucks. sorry for not replying, topdown. i just learned the hard way that if you write a post here that's too long, this message board loses the text and displays a message saying it's too long and i try to go Back and it says Page Expired. Jeez. i spent over an hour writing tthis REALLY LONG post and it's all gone. so now i know to copy a long post to the clipboard or a file before trying to post it. and i'm too tired to write any more. hey. thanks a lot for replying, TD. i really appreciate it. unfortunately, all i can say to you tonight before going to bed is that i left my strategy unchanged and will only be buying COR tomorrow at $1.90 or lower. or at least that's the plan until i can have my morning coffee and evaluate whether to change it or add to it. i have enjoyed the dialogue with you and SI very much. i wish you the best and thanks to everyone here for helping me become a better trader. that's what this is about. and as far as the nuke stuff goes, i enjoy explaining and discussing things, so if there's anything you want to talk about relating to radiation protection or other related areas, like homeland security, anything is open for discussion.
i got up to own 1000 @ $1.90 and have been buying more and that price and am now ahead of the line at both $1.90 and $1.91 and was getting fills at both prices, and so far have not had to pay $1.92. gotta see how many shares i have. it's kind of hectic and no coffee yet. i do have a position. thanks for all yr help. oders on autopilot are not a good idea. i got my wish. lots of shares below $2. it did gap up 3 cents for the open. so that's bullish. will reply to messages later.
Well. Posting my thoughts here has been a big help. Kind like an on-line journal of my stock trading. It's been very obvious that i OVERTHINK things, so thanks for getting that feedback. It's part of my training from working in nuke safety to be practically obsessive about "getting it right" and now that i no longer work in that arena, it's carried over to my stock trading. when we made mistakes at work, it was serious business. if we screwed up the safety analysis of a nuclear facility ... well for one thing it could be shut down and need retrofits. all to nuclear-safety grade QA. it would be a big deal and it could scare the public. If i could give you any advice, it would be to read up on the basic ideas of behavioral finance, which i've already mentioned sveral times, but it's basically looking at the psychology of auction markets and finding explanations for things like support and resistance in terms of people's desire to hold a losing position until they can get out even etc. as far as COR goes, with the 20:20 hindsight of seeing the stock free-fall to $1.78 @ 11:07 AM, i was right about it tending to "hug" the even 10-cent points, and there may be some psychological reason for that because i see it so often. it may be due simply to the fact that it's easier to do the math with "round numbers." anyway, now that i'm in and have a decent-sized position, i need to work on not letting it bug me that i "could have bought it cheaper." nobody could have known ... i think. or was there anything on the chart when it seemed to be holding steady at $1.90 between 9:40 and 10:33 to suggest weakness developing? to my simple minded view. the easiest explanation is that other market players looked at the chart and decided that they would gladly pay $1.90 per share for COR, and they got their wish, though many were so eager for shares that they kept bumping the last sale up to $1.91 and $1.92. But when all the demand at $1.90 was satisfied (like i was), then we stopped buying and there are A LOT of people who bought this stock well below $1.90 who would like to get out at a profit, and when FDA is a notoriously slow and often arbitrary regulatory agency, so the uncertainty of what the FDA will do and how long it will take them was being priced into many people's calculation of waht COR is "really worth." It's very clear to me that COR is "worth" much more than $63 M, so that was why i was so eager to buy it at $1.90. they literally gave me as many shares as i wanted. but the counter-parties (the sellers) are driven by their own considerations, which could be totally unrelated to COR, such as their wish to reallocate their capital into something else. it's forces like that which cause the "noise" of seemingly random price movements within the prevailing trend and trading range. please don't think i'm lecturing like i'm some kind of expert, it's just that i'm used to comunicating with the kind of tone. will it fall to support at $1.70 or $1.60 ... or even lower today? nobody except the potential sellers know that and they're not going to advertise the fact that they'd be happy to be rid of this "POS" that caused them so much grief that they'd be happy to have it gone from their portfolio even if they only get $1.50 for it. it's interesting to watch the roller-coaster, but i think that next month when it becomes clear that the whole problem of that clinical hold due to the rat tissue data coming from the formaldehyde that was supposed to preserve it becomes understood, that a whole bunch of new buyers will be coming in here. but only time will tell. i'm holding my shares and that chart has such a SICKENING slide to it that it caused a very obvious OVERREACTION to the news. and overreactions (both up and down) tend to correct as time plays out and the information becomes disseminated and the stock price will then tend to "regress to the mean." i think that COR is a classic example of an overreaction on the selling side that started (with the hindsight of the info on the rat tissue damage) ... way back last April when the stock was at $5.00. Happy Trading! BBF P.S. What stocks are you looking to buy now? i'm interested. why don't you write about it, or do you elewhere here? What's your investing style, so far. You said it hasn't been as successful as you hoped. So it may be kind of embarassing to write about it. But what if you frame it in terms of what you would LIKE IT TO BE? What would be your ideal trading style. I laid out mine and i gave you a practically blow-by-blow of how i handled it with CBLI and now with COR. What's your story?
Well it was a punk ass buy but that was me- all of 1200 shares @ $1.78 on COR. Turns out I had only a little over two grand in my spec account. Sold ACH & MED so if the stock can hang around for 3 days I will be back. Still having troubles buying and selling on the same day since I pissed Etrade off with a flurry of after hours trades one day when I didn't have funds in the account. ~stoney
aah. the old freeriding rule gotcha. right? hey. as far as Reg. T violations, i might win the prize here. i've transferred accounts to a new broker because of freeriding restriction put on my account. and then i had to transfer the account away from that second broker for the same reason. i was an old Waterhouse customer and was a beta-tester when they first came up with their on-line trading platform called Web-Broker. it's pretty archaic now, and of course it let me place trades in cash accounts that exceeded my true buying power. heck. their trading screen didn't even show me how much money i could spend, much less warn me that when i made a purchase in a cash account using unsettled funds that i was in fact using unsettled funds so i'd need to keep an eye on T+3. well, as each of my IRAs there got on 90-day restrictions i transferred them to Scottrade. and one of the reasons was that Scottrade would give a WARNING when using unsettled funds to make a buy, but they would still let you make a sale that would constitute a freeride and would give no warning. so as oneof them went on a 90-day restriction for selling unsettled shares i moved the account to Ameritrade. And after that was there and liked it imoved the other one. those 90-day restrictions are between the broker and the SEC, they don't carruy over with your account, even if it's an IRA. so those IRA accounts are now at Ameritrade (merged with Waterhouse) . i was so eager to trade and i hated doing the Schedule D carp, that when my old Waterhouse rep where i still had my taxable margin account at told me that the Ameritrade platform prevented customers from freerides and Reg T. violations, i moved all my accounts back to them. and so far their software has prevented one freeride. on the buy it just tells you you don't have enough cash. and if you try to sell something in a cash account before the shares have hit your accoiunt it tells you that you don't have enough shares for the trade. it works great and i'm very happy with them. congrats again on snagging those shares at a good price! it's a nice feeling tosnag some sharesand then see it rally. of course time will tell. i see a weakening chart. gotta look at the RSI.
well guys. i made a mistake Monday morning and that was violate one of the rules i'm trying to follow, basically: Never Fall in Love With A Stock. as was obvious from my posts i was acting as silly as a love-struck guy whose heart starts racing because a pretty girl in class he has a crush on asks him to come to her (grad student) office to work on a class project together. yup. it actually happened to me a few years ago taking a class as non degree w. degree just for the fun of taking an interesting class. well. the posts from SI and TD only encouraged that love-sickness, which was actually linked to my behavior over CBLI in agonizing over missing last Wednesday as the top day ... so much so that even though (as i said earlier) COR had been on my watchlist for a long time ... all through the April and October selloffs that the company had graciously e-mailed me a link to their Roth conference and invited me to listen to it in real-time last Wednesday afternoon. of course i was too busy to listen to it until i noticed the news story Friday about the Rodman & Renshaw upgrade based on the news announced Wednesday, which i had been invited to listen to Wednesday afternoon live. if i HAD, and i hadn't been distracted with my "potentially larger" realized gain seen via 20:20 hindsight, that is ... well i would PROBABLY have been able to buy at least some COR at Thursday's opening price. but that's not what happened. and part of the reason i was so over-eager to buy COR @1.90 in the first hour of trading Monday was that i was obsessed with having a lot of shares .... think of the BIG SCORE i could make. well, if i had stuck to my plan and allocated EQUAL buys at $1.90, $1.80, $1.70, $1.60, and $1.50 ... well, i would be in a much better position than i am now. oh well. this is a learning process. In retrospect of today's trading so fare where i saw it fall to $1.60 and then bounce to now .. $1.74 @ 10:24:26, i would have been better off using "dollar averaging" to lower my average buy price by buying equal DOLLAR buys (even though it makes doing the math harder) at each of these 10-cent price points. and yes, my gut feel was right that it would be silly to pay $2.00 a share for it because it bounced hard off the daily tops of Friday and Monday before reaching $2.00 so it would have brought in even more sellers at $2.00 even. my mistake yesterday was being so obsessed with a stock that i bought too much of it too soon. i need to do a better job of following the Patience is a Virtue adage and looked back at last Friday's trading range in the context of the 1-yr simple OHLC price/volume chart to pick my buy points at the ten-cent increments between $1.90 and $1.50, enhanced by my new thought that only came to me today of using dollar-cost averaging to buy relatively more shares at the successively lower price points. i might as well do the math for the buys that would have filled by last time i checked (where it had not yet reached $1.50) ... and my hunch is that it's only 50/50 whether it will get that low, so since i don't know it's happened yet, i'll lave it out because it's now bounced as high as $1.72 since reaching the daily low of $1.60 and the volume is now coming in to the market after a slow start. Assume $1000 buys exclusive of commission: Price Shares $1.90 526 $1.80 555 $1.70 588 $1.60 625 Cost for 2294 shares = $4000. Average price is $1.7437. Now that would be a buy that i could have not lost any sleep over. So, the next time i have a stock like COR that i'm just crazy to buy, i'll do the above type of buying strategy. Heck. It's still possible it will bounce off $1.50 so i'll run those #s. Price Shares $1.90 526 $1.80 555 $1.70 588 $1.60 625 $1.50 666 Cost for 2960 shares = $5000. Average price is $1.6892, or 3.1% lower. Happy Trading! BBF P.S. I violated two rules of good trading. Firstly, i did not immediately see that i had made a good trade with CBLI and moved on to resume my usual stalking mode looking for where to put those profits. And then when i found a stock i wanted, i was too eager to buy it that i piad more than necessary. Well, based on what i know of FDA and SEC rules, the CEO of Cortex would be is some serious doo-doo if he didn't have rock solid data to back up his statements Monday about the erroneous rat tissue damage that caused FDA to put the dose celing on their trials. The fact that the company reported that data and suffered the cost of $3.5 M because of lab work they almost surely contracted out means that COR is being cautious. And ... the knee-jerk respose of the FDA was to halt their trials last October. But based on that same data of rat tissue damage, the FDA and COR decided it was not so bad as to mean they couldn't put it in humans and the FDA released the clinical hold to be released and resume human dosing, though with a dose celing. And how did the market react to that news? The news of releasing the clinical hold? They pushed the price down from $3 to $1. So that made me see $3 as a price objective which seemed virtually certain, because that's where the price was when the market reacted to the GOOD news of releasing the clinical hold by pushing the price down ever more. So the way i see it, if you had the market react to what was really good news by driving the price DOWN to 1/3 of what it was in early April ... well. you guys should understand. will i be right in the end? will FDA reject their new data? gosh, i really doubt it, but it would be bad for the COR, that's for sure. so i'm counting on COR to have solid data to back up what they said at Roth and i'm counting on FDA (which already decided that even WITH that bad rat data they allowed human dosing) to allow the dosing levels which the company wants. over and out.
What up BioB? Wish I had that name! My first name is Ben and I have always been big into biotech. I think you have made several good points about COR and entry prices, although if you scale in the way you proposed to, you would be taking a $7.95 or whatever you pay for commission over and over again. I think the real mistake and we share this one 100% is this RUSH to reinvest. It's drug like and unexplainable but why must there always be something to rotate into? This gets worse when you think you may have left money on the table & you try to make up for it. I'm embarrassed to say this can get ultimate worst when you take a big hit and then take the approach I need a 100% winner NOW. And away we go down the drain. Always invest from strength even if you are scouring the biggest losers list. So for me that's Relative Strength on a down day and that's why I'm looking at CLN today. I have a BIG winner (it was bigger 2 days ago) in BSD Med they treat cancer with heat and these guys do the same in a different way. Yea it's down 3% but so many names are down 9% today. Cortex Pharmaceuticals Inc (COR) Last Price 1.71 Change -0.06 % Change -3.39 Shares 35m Last Trade 12:55 pm Volume 458300 Tick Day High 1.79 Day Low 1.6 Bid Size N/A AskSize N/A Market Cap 60m Open 1.79 Prev Close 1.77 52 Wk Hi 5.94 52 Wk Low 1.02 EPS(TTM) -0.49 Exchange AMX Looks like 25 minutes without a trade! Which is just fine with me in this kind of market. I could probably shake things up if I wanted to with this stock> but I'm a little chicken sh*t today. Do your DD here BB. Another relative strength play we must look at today is outside of biotech it is AENS- This is an alternative energy play it's old ADM management and they are going to build 2 Ethanol plants. On a day when FTEK is slapped for $2 and the whole alt energy space is red why would this ultra volatile name be trading so well? > AENS Alternative Energy Sources I (OTC BB) 1.14 -0.03 ( -2.15%) Open 1.19 High 1.19 Low 1.14 Volume 106,068 Prev Close 1.17 52-Wk High 2.98 52-Wk Low 0.16 P/E Ratio n/a Bid / Size 1.14 x 500 Ask/Size 1.15 x 1,200 EPS -0.03 Market Cap 46.2M* Shares Outstanding 40,500,000* *Numbers include tradable shares only