Hi, you might know me from threads such as "A 70k bet that I can't make a 50% gain in 2009" ( http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=148752 ). A little about me I trade part-time and trading is not a form of income for me (yet). I still consider myself in my first full year of trading as I started following a well defined system and posting trades in May 2010. I try to trade with a 2:1 R:R. After a trade has been entered it has only 2 possible outcomes; stop or tgt. The stop may be moved to b/e after the stock gets very close to tgt (around 80% of the way there). I use a max loss per trade and size all entries accordingly. After slippage and commissions i'm expecting my winners to be 1.8x bigger than my losers over a large sample size. I finished last year with a 44% winrate and hope to have similar (or better) results this year. I will attempt to post trades in real time but this may not always be possible. At the end of each day I will post a summary with charts and a write-up for each entry.
9:54 LONG RIMM 59.45 STOP 59.35 TGT 59.65 out +0.2 got to tgt in 80 seconds, nice way to open the year.
<img src="http://puddles.humanfund.ca/20110103/spy.png"> <img src="http://puddles.humanfund.ca/20110103/rimm.png"> 9:54 LONG RIMM 59.45 STOP 59.35 TGT 59.65 - RIMM gaps up with SPY - pulls back a little at the open then moves higher with a lot of conviction - tight higher low at the highs - out +0.2 http://puddles.humanfund.ca/wp/2011/01/03/2011-01-03-trades/
Hey puddles, Best of luck with your journal and your trading in 2011 !! I am sure this journal will be a good one. RW
Hi Puddles, Happy New Year and nice to see you have your own journal for 2011. I saw your chart for RIMM. I have traded RIMM previously, but wouldn't say I know it like the back of my hand. I see that you had a $0.10 stop. Isn't that too tight or do you have a different approach with your stops. When I trade stocks between $10-20, I seem ok, but the $50+ seem to give me a bit of a hassle. Any strategies?
Have you tried tick charts ?? Also, throw in Hiekn-Ashi on one of the lower time frames and then try to look for strength/weakness
my stop is bound by the prior bar. my long entry is always 1c over the high of the prior bar and the stop is generally 1c below the low. using that setup i arrived at my 10c stop. RIMM is pretty liquid especially during the first half hour so I'm not too concerned about the spread. I understand what you're saying but I try to look at the spreads and volume on a case by case basis rather than just the price level.
So you are in a hyper scalping, I am not sure if this is a profitable strategy for starters. If you use above rules for entry and stop, what do you use to exit a trade ??