11/01/2019: Taxable Acct: Trade Zero ============= Realized gain: -$130 ============== Taxable Acct: Robinhood ============= Realized gains: -$1464.52 ============== Stupid! Invested too much in this one loser stock! I know what works and what doesn't! I will stop doing what doesn't work(countertrend trading and swing trading) and do what works(daytrading nice trending stocks). What works easily generate nice profits. Keep doing that and avoid doing the bad trades. That's the goal for Nov! At the end of the month should see some really nice net profits! Yay! Have a good weekend everyone!
Interesting. You are fluctuating between large losses and large gains, but you are waffling on the swings. In my book, a swing is a trade you go balls-to-the-walls for. It is not some silly little hundred point drop. It is something you sweat and freak about when it goes 1000 points against you. And by then, you wait it out another 1000 points. THAT is a swing. That you are doing swings on individual stocks is also interesting, because Blue and I were in chat recently, and he indicated to me that he has sworn off the single-stock thing, and is switching over to the index trades. "...WHAT?! I was up close to a $1K and still got screwed. Couldn't get out! I'll NEVER trade illiquid stocks again!..." Geez, never knew you went to illiquid stuff. You're better than that. Practice with MGC, you'll prolly do better?
The large swings were due mainly to swing trades. The standard definition of swing trading is holding more than 1 day(that's daytrading). So a few days trade is what I called swing trading. What's hurting me is the swing trades. The daytrades I'm fine. There's NO WAY in hell will I hold for a 1000 points drop and waiting for it to come back. Maybe in the old days. Nowadays I would have gotten out long long ago and take the hit and cut my losses. That stock was were. The liquidity just disappeared and I seem to sold at the bottom of that big pullback. Then at the end of the day it went back even to where I was. oh well.
11/04/2019: Taxable Acct: Trade Zero ============= Realized gain: $207.13 ============== In and out a few quick trades. Nothing big. Still hampered by my swing trades that's eating up my margins and buying power! That's the negative effect of holding onto a bad swing trade. It even limits my intraday buying power of 4x. I tried to get in with size and I couldn't. That's part of my core strategy. Doing big size for super liquid stocks. This is the week. If my swing trades doesn't go back up then I take the hit and cut losses and get out. Right now it's just hanging there. Then I can have my buying power back and make my multi-thousand dollars days daytrading. That's my style and that's what i'm good at. Stick with it and over time just keep on improving and getting bigger. Gotta attend to non-trading activities now.
11/05/2019: Taxable Acct: Trade Zero ============= Realized gain: $2358.10 ============== Got out most of my swing trades on TradeZero platform. I should have gotten out everything. Still holding on a little bit since it seems to coming back hard. Though realized gain shows a decent gains(see above(, most of that is just MTM gains from being down. I'm not proud of that. But I'll take any gains I can get since now that I've gotten out most of my swing trades, tomorrow my buying power will be back up! woohoo!! I can daytrade with SIZE again! Whew! Let's see what happens tomorrow. I still have a sizeable open swing trade position at Merrill Edge. But since it recovered almost everything I'm still holding to end of this week to see what happens. Buying power is the lifeblood of daytraders. I will not hold swing trades in the TZ account anymore. I need that BP to daytrade! hehe
11/06/2019: Taxable Acct: Trade Zero ============= Realized gain: $744.65 ============== Taxable Acct: Merrill Edge ============= Realized gains: $1,477.61 ============== Taxable Acct: Robinhood ============= Realized gains: $554 ============== Whew! Today got out all of my poisonous swing trades! Such a relief! More importantly, now I have my buying power back!! Buying power is the superpowers of daytrading! Swinging size again! The initial gains today were modest. But gains nevertheless. The initial realized gains on Merrill Edge is just MTM gain from being down. So net net I'm back up but not a huge amount. Got out with a few pennies profits on size. Of course, the stock now proceeds to give up all of its morning gains. I'll stick with daytrading. Swing trading is too hard to predict. Then later on the day, I saw CHK it was down over 27%. Then my countertrend bad habit kicked it. I went in 45K shares!! Then it went like 15 cents against my initial entry I mean I averaged in so it was down maybe less than 10 cents. But extremely bad risk/reward. I thought it has gone way way too much. Then it went down some more to at one point being down 30% from the opening. WHOA! I thought it would go to 0. literally. It kept falling and falling and falling. Very dangerous to try to catch a falling knife. Whew! I got out of all 45K shares and made about $450 on that trade on TZ. But it's a horrible extremely bad way to trade! Gotta keep that countertrend mentality in check! I was in another 45K shares in Merrill Edge and got out for a small profit. Was in 5000 shares in Robinhood got out at a small profit. Scary. For the Tradezero, I could have held for a few more pennies. Oh well. Still holding on some calls in RH. Let's see how it performs tomorrow. Crazy ride! Too much size is scary!
11/07/2019: Taxable Acct: Trade Zero ============= Realized gain: -$1421.86 ============== Horrible trading today. I couldn't find anything good. So I went back to my old stock that I got out of my swing trade yesterday. I was down huge then when it went back up yesterday I sold everything for a profitable. Whew. Such a relief. Then today this POS stock of course went down from the highs and I thought it's "cheap". The most dangerous word in daytrading. I loaded up 20K shares. It was flat for long time should have been an indicator. Stupid me. I held on and now sold at a over a $1K loss. When it didn't move I could have sold everything for $200 loss. Very manageable. The other bad trade was GLD. News came out. It tanked. I bought. Then it tanked some more. I waited and waited and exit at the bounce for a small loss. Should have timed that bottom much better. My bad countertrend trading bad habits are coming back. Luckily, I was able to control the loss. So I loss a day's worth of gains. Frustrating that it's so ingrain. Bad habits are hard to kick. It could have been a day of profit had I stopped in the morning. Wasted my time. Tomorrow will be a better day. I got out of everything. I don't like holding anything overnight. I need the max buying power in my account. Holding overnight position would count against my buying power tomorrow. I need that max BP to get into good trades to recover's today's losses. @jl1575 That dream of $5k/day average is gonna take some time to get to. Still very possible. But gotta stop doing the stupid trades.
How profitable are you since you started this journal? 2019 turns out to be a very good year for those of us who simply bet long following @dozu888.
11/08/2019: Taxable Acct: Trade Zero ============= Realized gain: -$41.14 ============== Today was platform issue. My broker software system fcked up again. They miscalculated my equity and said I need to meet a margin call when I had NO position on. So I was the phone with them and kept calling. They said they know there is an error but they had to talk to their Compliance dept and some bullsh*t. Wasted my morning. Missed out on a few good runner. By the time they figured how to lift that lock on my account, my morning was over and I didn't feel like trading anymore. I had an open limit order that I forgot to cancel before I went to my meeting. I came back and I'm a proud owner of a 500 shares. I exited immediately because that's not part of the plan. Took a $50 hit. Otherwise I would be up slightly like $13 for the day. Geez. They said from now on it should be good. Frustrating to see good trades but I couldn't get in. I have other brokers. I should have gotten in the good trades using the other brokers. I was so frustrated dealing with this broker that I missed out on taking advantage of the good trades using my other brokers. Oh well. They say it's gonna be much much better soon. Ever since they switched clearing firm, there has been tons of issues and bugs and reporting issues. Next week is another week. Live to fight another day and get better as a trader.
I actually don't know since reporting is so bad on 2 of my online brokers. In Robinhood I don't know until after end of month. IB is the only one with accurate daily reporting of P&L. So, in Aug I had very solid performance with futures in IB. Then in Sept I did horrible with futures on IB due to a few big mistakes. Traumatic! Without those stupid mistakes I would be up nicely. But after that traumatic experience, I decided to stop trading futures. Only very selectively. Then Oct and Nov I've done well so far trading mostly equities. I haven't done equities in a while but now that I'm back I feel pretty good about it. I can trade size now. The biggest being 45K shares. Actually 90K shares because it was 45K in each account and I had 2 accounts so it's 90K shares! It was scary but I ended up making some money. I have also started to withdraw money from my accounts as I make profit as a way to "pay myself". Had I done that with IB then I would have lost all that great profits I made in Aug. This keeps me on my toes and constantly trying to perform well and it's nice to see the money coming into my bank account and getting to use it. Rather than just numbers on a computer screen. It's sweet. I think I finally found my "trading niche" in the equities market. Just trading superliquid stocks and move size for pennies move. Seems to work out so far. Knock on wood. It feels very "natural" and easy for me to move size in these superliquid stocks. Mind you they are NOT all penny stocks. They are superliquid with high volume and narrow bid/ask spread. So easy to get in and get out in case you make a mistake. I hate trading illiquid names as mentioned in one of my earlier post. Wide bid/ask and hard to get out when you want and you can't move volume. What's the point of holding these illiquid stocks if you can't buy enough shares even if you capture 20-30-50cent moves. Or worse yet, you buy a few thousand shares and it goes up but as soon as you try to sell the volume disappear! You are left holding the bag and get out a horrible fills!t I only feel safe trading smaller size with illiquid stocks and it doesn't have a meaningful impact on my portfolio. So now when I see an illiquid stock I avoid them. I rather get in a liquid stock with size 10K-45K shares a clip. Ride it for a few pennies. Rather than get in for a few hundred shares and ride it for 30cents to 40cents. Ideally, I want to get in large size and ride for the big move. I'm still working on holding my winners longer. That's the holy grail for me. Once I can do then I would have moved to the next level in my trading. But that's where I need to go if I want to meet my goal of $5K/day on average. To answer you question, I went mostly long. One time I went short 30K shares of PCG. It was scary when it went like over 10 cents against me but the chart told me to hold. I held and made money even after the expensive borrow fees to short it. Net net still up nicely. But for the most part it has been on the long side. How's your trading been going @ironchef ?