Down 2% mis-timing the bounce on AA. I really need to work on relaxing my emotional state while I hold a short-term position. My impulses work the reverse of the way they do with long term holds and I behave irrationally both buying and selling. Momentum isn't just a word.
1% off of JNY on the open. If I were patient I'd give it the chance to go higher, but since it's showing no sign I'm taking my profits and running.
Picked up SINA on the morning upswing, told myself I'd hang onto it until it started showing signs of dropping. Couldn't do it... sold at +2.5%. One of these days I'll have the guts to hang onto my winners, but not today.
None of my potentials went anywhere and I'm not interested in buying for the sake of buying, so this will be another day without a trade. This market feels unfriendly.
Picked up 1% on CSTR after its crash failed on the open. That makes +2.5% on the week, and +12% overall. Still operating on a beginner's high, and I expect some major drawdown in the near future as my luck cracks. For whatever reason, despite my complaints, the market and I have remained in uneasy accord. I had set a casual unspoken goal of 15% by year's end and I'm nearing that at three weeks. It's very hard not to tell myself I'm a trading genius. This rally is a shift in recent market movement, however, and it's quite likely I've just picked an ideal time for my strategy to flourish. Part of me wants to pull out now and mark this a delightful success. Another part thinks it was silly to forbid myself margins when I could be making four times the gains. For now, I'll listen to neither.
Spoke too soon, I guess. Broke an unspoken rule and bought JVA before the open. Just sold it at +8%. Again, extremely tempting to see this as a signal to make riskier moves and behave irrationally... but it was just a lucky guess. Could easily have gone the other way and I'd have lost two weeks of gains. Pretty happy with myself at the moment, though.
Perhaps, but in my experience the hard part isn't making money so much as it's not losing money. Went back to breaking my rules again, but not one so fundamental as yesterday. The market had been selling the rumor for so long on GS that I thought it might buy the news. It did: +2% for me today.
Again my psychology of trading is so bizarre. When I win it makes me nervous, when I lose it makes me bold. That 8% up day has all but completely removed my will to trade. I've been watching potentials all morning and failing to pull the trigger. Maybe I needed a day off, so I'll take one.
Awkwardly timed the QCOM bounce, but still got a little more than +1% off it. Volume on the microcaps is very low this morning. I wonder what's up.
Absolutely everything went up today, I happened to be on board AMD and got 4.5% on it. Which puts some happy punctuation on the end to an absurdly good week: up more than 16%. My account is up about 30% since this experiment began and I have no idea what to credit it to other than dumb luck. I've been relatively disciplined in my behavior, but my stock picking methodology is arbitrary and profoundly clumsy. Part of me wants to bow out here rather than watching all these gains disappear in a long string of one or two percent down days. The other part wants to double down and start taking bigger risks. I think I'll compromise by taking enough out of the account to buy myself a new computer. I've been meaning to replace this thing for years. If I start losing money here, hey... I'll still be losing it on a new computer!