How do you choose your stocks cheetohs? Do you have a standardized watch list, or do you focus update that every day to include stocks in the news. As for your run....keep pushing until you start to lose. You have to have an uncle point. That is, in addition to your daily stop, a point where you will stop the bleeding and reevaluate what is going on. Somewhere around 10k, given your current account size. I have seen too many guys start the double down process when things start going bad and they end up blowing there entire account. That's my advice, take it FWIW.
"Do you set mental or actual stops?" Yeah, mental stops. Never used the actual stop although that that is recommanded by everyone. But because I move in and out quick, putting real stop means I have to cancel that stop before I can sell which is too cumbersome. But I should have some wider stops to stop myself from takeing huge loss like I did w/ CI yesterday. Finshed the day just below $3000. Last 2 hours have been a waste. Got into AAPL to put me just over $3K but lost that by buying 3000 shares of PIR and sold for .03 loss per share. But one thing I DID learn is my strategy or my understanding of the market does not work in the afternoon. What I did was I resisted temptation to get in 3 big trades and just watched while dabbling a bit with PIR. I wanted bet WFMI was going down but it didn't. Went up like .70. If I didn't stop myself, I would have gone in and probably lost at least $1K on that trade. So until I figure out what is going on, it will mostly observation from now after 2pm.
"How do you choose your stocks cheetohs? Do you have a standardized watch list, or do you focus update that every day to include stocks in the news." I have about 50 stocks that I follow on my streamer. All very active to fairly active stocks w/ big short interest. Lot of common name stocks like dna, anf, all big internet stocks, ntri, esrx, bidu, sbux, wfmi, etc. Stocks that avg. joes love to short are very good daytrading stocks because you know when the MMs will run the stock. So I usually sit back and let it really rise before shorting for quick profits. Or buy it to go up when stock drop quite a bit after the squeeze because once it starts to move up again desperate shorts will cover. Big short interest is great because this allows MMs to sqeeze them and you try to play along as best you can w/o yourself getting squeezed too.
Cheetos, Hopefully this story will confirm your feeling about "too good to be true". There was a remote trader at my firm who traded successfully for several years until, on that fateful day 12/3/2003, found himself bottom picking CECO (I had just started at the firm and watched the firm position in this stock since it was the big news stock of the day). All indicators kept calling for a reversal and he kept loading up, just to see the price plummet again. But the indicators kept screaming "oversold!" so he didnt cover. Afraid he would cover the bottom and watch a massive reversal. So he kept long and strong. Every .50 cents he'd buy another 5k shares. Anyways, to make a long story short, he lost 300K that day and that was it for him. He'd been wiped out. 300k of his own fucking money!! The moral of the story is, bottom picking stocks will work quite often if timed well, but all it takes is that one time where things go very wrong and all those previous gains and then some get wiped out. Hopefully this helps confirm the eerie feeling you are having. Be safe!
Zenith, I think there is a list somewhere on the web w/ most heavily shorted stocks. NTRI is one of them but you have to be very careful w/ that stock. Also, TZOO, MSO, HANS, OSTK, etc. but those stocks are hard to borow. I was never able to short those stock w/ Ameritrade. Now, I can't even short NTRI. The stock was available for borrowing prior to the earnings last week and made lots of $ on shorting that stock. I tried shorting it 2 days after earnings, no more. At least as of yesterday, I can't even short GM through Ameritrade. I don't know if its temporary or not but strange. No, I usually double down but it usually involves me going in w/ less shares to begin with. I mean with ITWO for example, I only went in 1500 shares at a time. And only reason I went in the 3rd time was because I saw big blocks of bids by 2 different MMs and one ECN so I knew I was safe at that point.
Cheetos, I don't think double or triple down is a good idea long term... I know that's where a lot of consistency coming from. I prefer to get out when enter incorrectly (and possibly reenter later). It will hurt profitability short term but I want to survive first. The scenerio Steve described is very real. Do you have steps put in to manage this? Regards, KC
"Anyways, to make a long story short, he lost 300K that day and that was it for him. He'd been wiped out. 300k of his own fucking money!!" He must have been overleveraged. How can one lose so much? What was his leverage? Was it more than 10 to 1? Ameritrade only gives me 4 to 1 daytrading power.
Regardless of his leverage, the concept still remains the same. His 300K wiped him out, for you maybe it would only take 15k, 20k. Its all relative. The point is that this method of trading, combined w/ unusual stock activity can lead to disaster. Thats all I am saying.