say it ain't so

going into today i was long 2 stocks and short 2. my longs were stopped out at the open because of the plane crash news. now watch the market go up and my shorts get stopped out too. lol

 

Does it feel like somedays that the Market Makers
moves the market just enough to hit your stops
and then go in the other direction just to laugh at you?

Well, you're not alone. Develop your game and stick to it.
Have methods for re-entry after being stopped out if
all signals are still a go.

 

jsmith,

As a corrollary to your first point, what I see a lot of recently is that stocks seem to move just enough to take out the previous days' high or low and then reverse. My suspicion is that this is because of so many books and strategies recently that use setup entries that are 1 tick beyond the previous day's extremes. They therefore suck you in and reverse the market on you looking to stop you out.

Just my own little paranoid theory, but it's happening much too often recently to be a coincidence.

 

I generally wait til the previous day's low is taken out before I enter my longs now. I save 20c always, and get as much size as I want.

 

p2,

Did you catch anyone of these ENE, PVN, ACTM.

 

Gordon,

I've carried pairs of stocks overnight also and have found that it's a good way to hedge your bets. If you pick out good long positions and good short positions, I've found that the market will reward one or the other and you will usually not take that bad of a hit on the ones bucking the trend. Just last week I picked 4 longs and 3 shorts and they all went my way, some more than others. I've often thought that proper diversification actually means some short/some long.

BTW

Contradicting what I just said, I was short 3 positions going into the open today, just as I was 9/11, and made huge $. I think this market really wants to go long but I still see more risk of stocks dropping on a single event than rising.

Good Luck and Big Profits

 

To this from JSmith... "Does it feel like somedays that the Market Makers moves the market just enough to hit your stops and then go in the other direction just to laugh at you?

Of course they do, they know who you are, where you live, and can actually feel you squirm when they hit your stops!
In all seriousness, this is one major reason that we don't recommend stop orders for closing positions, only for opening. And to get an actual stop order on the NAZ, you have to really trust your broker with your wallet, since the stops are not really centrally placed, and even the ECN equivalents are questionable IMHO.

 

this could actually be an interesting idea..that's when everyone is selling.