Gold showing a buy again overnight, therefore re entered on ASX open today, give or take a few minutes. Positions bought: DRM EVN NCM NST OGC RRL SAR SBM
themickey, I just want to say I enjoyed reading your journal, your background and wish you the very best. I am an amateur mom and pop full time trader, trading equity options in the US market, up against professionals so I appreciate and respect someone like you. I am enjoying trading as a second career after quitting my day job some time ago. Best of luck to a good guy.
Dumped SDA - Speedcast - telecom sector. It's not performing so just got rid of it, actually the Australian telecom sector as a whole is dragging its feet. On SDA lost 5.1%. Currently holding: GOLD POSITIONS: DRM EVN NCM NST OGC RRL SAR SBM NATURAL GAS POSITIONS: LNG, ORG COPPER POSITIONS: SFR TELECOM POSITIONS: SPK CNU Currently my trading accounts are just treading water, has done for a while now. The day before yesterday my internet connection in the house went down. Currently going online via tethering off my mobile phone. I have only been in this current house 4 weeks therabouts and this is the 3rd instance of losing internet, seems to occur during and after heavy rain.
Bit of chop going on atm, gold and copper up again. Went back into some favorites today, Copper and Mining in general. Oz Minerals, Mineral Resources, Ausdrill, Bluescope Steel. OZL, MIN, ASL, BSL. Metals X I need to get back into, will await a pullback as it gapped up a little too severe today.
Today had a reshuffle on positions, expecting gold to break out upward shortly. Sold Bluescope Steel for a loss after shares plunged on warnings that high energy costs were impacting on its profits. Sold out of Chorus and Spark (telecoms). They came to breakeven on profits. Telecoms I had hoped had bottomed but it appears this sector is a dog and prolly won't revisit this sector again in foreseeable future. As well, telecoms are lagards atm, there is no fire in them so I figure tying up money with this group is wasting talent, there are better fish to fry. Bought back into Metals X (copper producer), also bought Beach Energy. Added a new gold stock to the portfolio, Gold Road Resources. Currently Positions: GOLD: DRM, EVN, GOR, NCM, NST, OGC, RRL, SAR, SBM OIL / NATURAL GAS: BPT, LNG, ORG COPPER: SFR, MLX, OZL MINING GENERAL: ASL, MIN If you are following this thread you may notice something common, many of the positions I keep buying are the same shares, this as I have a core of what I consider are the creme of the sectors I trade. Every now and again I may add something new, but it's not that often.
I'm beginning to forget to update this journal as I don't trade that frequently, but yesterday added GBT to acc#2 on open and today added DCN to acc#2 on open. Position size approx $20k each. Every now and again I buy a stock which is not mining related because predominantly I buy mining related stocks. I have been using Amibroker for many years and I have a couple of favourite explorations. In Amibroker an exploration is basically an algo you run which searches your coded criteria. One exploration looks for stocks breaking out, I prefer those stocks which are beaten down. GBT is one I spotted that looked promising so took a punt, up about 11% in two days so far. DCN is a gold stock, it went off my radar for a while as it was underperforming, but it popped back into the 'have 2nd look' category and as mentioned bought that this morning on open. So currently I'm holding 10 gold stocks now, I'll run with these until the next gold trend change. Note, these all on ASX.
Urgency and emotion: the two biggest time wasters in investment. http://www.smh.com.au/money/investi...me-wasters-in-investment-20170904-gyaquf.html We are all flying through life. Busy busy busy. Important things to do. Can't talk, can't stop, can't go, can't come, can't make it, can't do it. Time has become the most valuable asset on earth and the most generous of gifts. Use it or lose it. Make it or waste it. We all worry about money but the truth is that the most precious gift you can give anyone these days, especially your family and kids, is your time, and all this technology-driven rushing about that's going on has elevated its value to immeasurable heights. With this in mind I am going to tell you how to save time in the financial markets, because when it comes to the sharemarket there are a lot of things that waste your time. Here are two. The first is urgency. The talking heads in the media speak daily and react by the second. That is their gig. And because of their focus on each "moment" they will always paint a picture of disaster when the market falls and a bubble when the market rises. They will also miraculously appear to be vastly more intelligent and adept at investing than you or I, well you, because they have seemingly miraculously "bought the stock last month", before it went up, or "never liked the stock" when it goes down. But the truth is that they are there to further their businesses and brands by looking clever, and the quality of their commentary is very short term and of little value. The fact that some TV programs embarrassingly use a countdown clock to economic numbers, and that most of their presenters breathlessly shout their comments tells you the daily news game is about trying to generate urgency, to be animated, to be exciting. But when it comes to investment and financial news, the urgency, I can tell you, does not pay. If I have learned anything in the sharemarket game over 35 years, it is that you will not make long-term progress with a short-term focus. You cannot stare at your screens all day and make money. Being first does not matter. Being right matters, and in the sharemarket game the only edge the average Joe need concern themselves with is on the horizon because there is no edge reacting to breathlessly urgent talking heads today. The sharemarket game is to assess which stocks have a future over years not over the next half an hour. Tomorrow all the urgent talking heads will be over-reacting again, to tomorrow's momentary issues. But for your own financial health it's probably best you ignore them (including me). It is just a commercial show. We are building our brands but wasting your time. The second time waster is emotion. How many more articles do we have to rehash about cognitive bias, emotion and anchoring before everybody gets the point that to be successful investors humans simply have to put their human traits aside. You have to be detached and logical, like Spock in Star Trek, about investment and trading. When you are losing money it is normal to become emotional, but it is pointless. There is no certainty, there is no Holy Grail, there is just a process of narrowing the probabilities as much as possible in your favour. When you have done your best it is pointless getting upset or elated by the share price performance afterwards. What just happened to the share price has no bearing on what will happen. Absolutely anything can happen and you have to assess and react to that, not get emotional about it and certainly not "care". Humans are wired for hope, to like, to hate. But there are no "good stocks", or "bad stocks". Vulcans would make much better investors. They are wired to coldly process the information and make a logical, dispassionate decision. Meanwhile human investors get confused, depressed, optimistic, pessimistic, we worry about whether we are in loss, or profit, anchoring ourselves to some previous share price that is now irrelevant to tomorrow's share price. Human emotions add no value when it comes to clinical decision-making. There is no liking or hating in investment. What you paid for a stock is irrelevant. Instead what you might try, in order to excise your human failings from your decision, is to chronicle your impassive process. We all have our process, a sequence of things we do when deciding whether to buy or sell a stock. We might not know it, and we might operate it without a lot of conscious planning. But we would all do well to write it down, turn it into an algorithm and put it up on an Excel spreadsheet. Only then could our process operate without emotional interference. The bottom line is, when it comes to investment, being human is a waste of time.
We talk about edges in trading as if this were the holy grail. "If I only had that secret indicator which can predict the future" Well it's not that simple. Say for example you bought XYZ share yesterday, you loaded up big time because all indications were this had huge potential. Then today the price gapped down, right through your stop, so you are now holding a losing position. Your brain tells you XYZ has huge potential, your brain tells you you can buy more now at a cheaper price, but you are wearing a newly minted loss. What do you do? Your system indicated a buy, your system set a stop loss which didn't trigger, your brain screams it wants to buy more. You have to sell! There is no holy grail in trading but yourself.
Just sold out of all gold positions. I'm not happy with how it's looking at support. I had been confident that gold was going to continue up hence holding thru this retracement, but not so sure about that now. Next time I will exit earlier, no point believing anything with gold as the gold sector is one of the most fickle beasts on the stock market. Gold is very difficult to make money on imo. I prefer not to be a short term trader, but with gold you are kinda forced to be.
This morning on open sold Beach Energy for an 18% profit and sold Origin Energy for a 7% loss. Bought into 10 gold positions on open, the usual contenders. I believe we have hit the bottom on gold this leg. This concludes this journal, the whole point of the exercise was basically I was fed up with Surf saying TA was nonsense and TA traders never could prove they made money. I definitely have made money trading as well as through this journal's live postings. Granted I am not part of the TA indicators brigade, I use zero indicators other than trend lines and I observe support & resistance levels. I use no conventional stop losses. I enter and exit on price action which is the study of behavior, after trading for 30+ years it becomes a little instinctive what does and does not work. I don't spend time drawing lines, just eyeball them. I operate Amibroker and code algos on price behavior, this does not offer me buy or sell signals (well I have an algo for that but never use) my algos offer me best contenders, then I cherry pick from the best and basically trade via high probabilities. My entry and exits are purely discretionary, I observe near term behavior then go for it. It's not rocket science, just experience from trading over so many years. Trading is about being right more than being wrong, you'll slowly build up the bank and dont be afraid to get out smartly if wrong. If you own 11 stocks and one plunges 25% in an instant, the other 10 stocks only need to win 2.5% each and you are ok again.