Many thanks dbphoenix. As I said in my previous response I don't really see how this is different from what I currently do except I am taking a bit of a shortcut. No doubt I am missing something.
Sure he could fire up his trading platform on our lunch break if it's web based and show me his open positions, some may be winning, some may be losing, I may even get a peek at his account balance, but I doubt he is going to talk me through a live trade in an office environment where he could attract unwanted attention. I know I wouldn't feel comfortable doing that. How long until my posts bypass the moderation queue? Is it not obvious by now I'm not a spammer or a trying to sell something? It's very inconvenient.
5. But if you want more specific advice, much less guidance, you're going to have to be more specific yourself regarding what your signals are and what your failed trades have been. If you have a trading plan, post it. If you don't, write one. Otherwise this will be yet another multi-hundreds thread of theory and philosophy.
OK that posted straight away but my earlier responses seem to have been misplaced. Well at the risk of repeating myself, what I wanted to say to dbpheonix and Gringo is thank you very much for your replies, they are much appreciated and I don't mean to sound cocky with what I am about to say. My approach is basically to find stocks in a strong uptrend moving in the same direction as the S&P and buy the dips. So I scan for stocks which have retraced, with narrowing width candles making up the retracement and decreasing volume. My research indicates that this is reasonable evidence that the stock is in a pull-back and not about to collapse and therefore a good long candidate. Reverse for shorts. Now I could page through hundreds of charts every night "engaging with price" or I can write a scanner to do that part for me, that's not laziness in my book, that's efficiency.
Well I am quite partial to a philosophical debate but you make a good point. Trade plan attached. You may recognise this as my take on the floor trader method: http://www.trading-naked.com/FloorTraderMethod.htm
Not cocky at all. Your approach is very simple and straight-forward, or at least seemingly so (there's many a slip twixt the cup and the lip). That's a giant plus, partly because it can be simple to trade and partly because it can be simple to scan for. When I traded stocks, I used a scanner myself to get a universe (I then "thumbed through" them by hand). But the computer can do only so much. If you're doing everything right and still failing, then perhaps manually "engaging price" will illuminate the problem.
I have some problems with this plan but they're irrelevant if the plan is working for you. If it isn't, then my reservations may be worth consideration. In any case, regarding the trades you've posted (and in future please provide this information in your post; I won't be opening any more Excel files), how did you enter MOS at 47.76 when the high that day was 47.47? In any case, there wasn't and hasn't been any reason -- in the context of price behavior -- to exit the trade. Incidentally, about the philosophical debate. There are thousands of such threads here at ET but they don't matter much when the time comes to make a decision regarding whether or not to transmit an order. What matters at crunch time is whether or not one has a plan of action that goes beyond letting the market make all the decisions.
I would very much appreciate it for you to share your reservations regarding my trade plan. I didn't want to admit this as it will no doubt give everyone the impression I am a hopeless noob, but I use a spread betting account as I am reluctant to commit significant capital to this venture before I can consistently make money. So I set my long order at the high of the hammer and my spreadbet broker gave an ask price of 4768 and the rest I guess can be explained by slippage? If you look at the attached chart my long order got filled after which the stock immediately tanked and hit my stop.