FX Took a hit on EURUSD with a $74.00 loss on the long. Action hasnt been the best out there with a swift ride up and then even a faster one down. However, not overly worried. Diversification through systems and pairs is paying out as I would have had a bigger loss otherwise. Currently holding a short EURCHF trade which is in the red as well. Just a case of the mondays. Return FX (since starting journal): +22.15%
I just learned a lesson in trading. DONT BE LAZY. I forgot to update my indicators on TKO over the weekend and missed a very nice signal to go long. Here is a chart based upon last week's data: Notice the divergence between price and the indicators. Today TKO is up over 7%. A foolish mistake that I am paying for. Missing profit to me is more painful than taking losses. After todays close I will evaluate the situation and come up with a trading senario to enter TKO.
EURCHF short closed with a loss of -$40.25 as well as a -$1.00 swap fee. Total loss on trade -$41.25. Not the best conditions to be trading intermediate term waves. Still holding steady. Return FX: +20.50% Got filled on MUSAW at 2.74/share. Not a bad fill. Positioned well for the takeover which should net some good cash. Starting next week I will post results from my quantitative equities screening method to see how viable it is. Currently its long only however I am working on a short candidate screen. Will see how that goes. Return Equities: +0.82% Depending on action tomorrow I am looking to go long TKO. Some contracts should be coming this way especially now that TKO has gotten the FIPS approval. Read a news article that Google and Goldman Sachs have given 100 million to a BPL company. TKO due to its patents are to gain if BPL becomes a viable method. Lets see how it goes.
FX No trades made on the FX account. However, I am positioned with limit and stop orders to take advantage of any sustained dollar bear trend if any pops up this week. The movement has been nasty. The month of August was definitely not the best for trading. Maybe next year I will not trade at all in August and take a break. Return FX: +20.50% Equities I picked up even some more MUSAW shares at the very low for the day 2.55. I am pretty overweight in this deal however I am very confident on the deal as well as the pricing as two very well known and trusted groups are involved. BIDU made a move up on below 3/5 of the average volume. Probably some short covering. Not too worried about that. GOOG down 1.80 for the day on low volume as well. Nothing too big going on there. I am following TKO closely. It is inching down today after the momentum indicators had a big move up very fast. However it did slip down on 1/2 the average volume so I am still on the bullish stance. I also have some very solid fundamental reason for being bullish on this company. Return Equities: +0.82%
Have a short USDCAD trade placed. Currently down some 10 pips. Lets see how this plays out. The markets have surely not been the best for trading since mid August.
Equities I have decided to start trading some of the quantitative screens I have developed for the past few months. Screens are made based upon fundamentals only. Trends are established based upon earnings, returns, and debt level data to create the positions. One of the biggest factor is to identify securities with a lot of earnings momentum that are trading at reasonable valuations. I am very strict regarding stop loss levels and the screen is run daily to identify which securities should be exited and which should be added. My timeframe is much broader when dealing with this and expect holding times to be months and in the rare instances years. I have put in market orders for the following: Long: Biosite Incorporated (BSTE) Devon Energy (DVN) D.R. Horton Inc. (DHI) Pulte Homes Inc. (PHM) Commerce Bancorp Inc. (CBH) Fair Isaac Corporation (FIC) RLI Corp. (RLI) WFS Financial Inc. (WFSI)
Equities Had some good fills today on my orders. Here is the list: BSTE 58.76 DVN 59.32 DHI 34.36 PHM 82.96 CBH 33.31 FIC 40.44 RLI 45.5 WFSI 65.8 I have also gone long TKO at 3.49. Yesterday's pull back was very small with half the average volume so it made no sense to not go long. Overall not too bad. My other positions are also holding steady. FX The dollar bear move proved to be ample enough to trigger my orders and make some money. Currently long eurusd, short usdchf and usdcad. All positions have stop losses at or above breakeven. Currently up some $122 in open positions. Lets see if this is the start of a nice sustained trend after about 15-20 days.
A great move in both equities and FX today helped end August with a decent gain in a pretty tough FX and equities market. Notable equity trades were on TKO (up 11%) and DHI (up 8%) with the others making solid gains as well. My equity beta is actually at the lowest level since I began trading them for a few years now. It lies at around 1.00. FX had some solid sustained moves today. Two positions were however acted lower than I expected them to. One was the USDCAD short which was at one point up some 70 pips however it had big ranges and was acting very choppily and ended up being exited with only a 26 pip gain. The second was USDJPY trade which is still open. While the other pairs have basically taken off USDJPY showed great resistance to price movement and is currently sitting with a 17 pip floating loss. Overall however the returns were good comparitively. Returns [since starting journal:] FX: +27.71% Equities: +3.60%
FX The trend is being caught very well. I had to use manual intervention today as I have closed out trading on a group of pairs. This is due to a programming error on the entry criteria which is causing some erratic behaviour. The erratic behavious has cost me around a 3 dollar loss only however a bad market situation is all it would take to potentially cause some lasting damage. So for now trading just 5 pairs. The current trend has been caught very nicely by the system. USDJPY is still resisting the dollar bearish condition in play in other markets. That position is still in the red with a 25 pip unrealizes loss. AUDUSD is also resisting the dollar bear move with a unrealized profit of only 17 pips. However, the big wins on EURUSD and USDCHF which are still open have unrealized profits of 143 and 126 pips respectively. Overall some nice trading. I am definitely getting my systems bug fixed over the weekend so all should be operational and running at 100% efficiency by start of next week. Return FX (start of journal): +30.8%
FX Capitalizing on this trend very well. I really wish I didnt find that error now. I would actually be up some 400 pips currently on the positions on the other pairs. Oh well profit missed due to darned programming errors. I did make great money though. All trades still open with a total unrealized profit of +560 pips. Return FX (since starting journal): +42.00%