Exactly, there was a period near the end of March where the breakouts (my previous AAPL bread and butter) became shallower with more retrace, so I dropped AAPL since POT was really working well for me, and I was starting to trade CL live for the first time and wanted to really focus on it, because if you blink too hard you can miss a great move.
LOL, you are an idiot, you clearly dont trade for a living. I never said at any point that it was a "guaranteed road to success" to learn to trade based on one stock. I simply said you can eliminate alot of variables by trading one stock day in and day out, and learning how to figure out repeatable, tradeable patterns this way. What good does it do to point a rookie towards something like CLF, which had been making highly volatile moves for moniths prior to this post, fact of the matter is if you want to learn trading it is much easier to learn from a single instrument rather than many and risk being overwhelmed. You dont have to factor in the vix, or any other extenuating circumstances. Once a new trader learns how to trade one stock they can figure out how to apply it to many different stocks, on a different scale. Any time you want to put up a blotter and try to silence me feel free you jack ass. I have trained many traders and i make alot more than any piker like you could dream of. I just gave you tons of examples on how to make money against a bot which is pennying you on your HFT thread, but you would rather cry about how hard it is than figure out a way to make money for yourself.
POT doesn't trade "different" in that it goes up and down like everything else. What POT does do is move in strong even trajectories from pivot high to pivot low without a lot of jumpiness or a wide spread. Each decent move in POT is generally 1.00 or better, so when trading 200-400 shares, you make decent money. What AAPL did (and still may do; I no longer watch it) is have strong breakouts. You could pretty much guarantee an instant gain of .50 or better if you bought AAPL a tick or two before it tested the day's high. Usually those breakouts just kept on going, too. NFLX has great breakouts, too, but the spread is obscene on that thing, so it didn't fit my trading criteria. I don't know why it's so hard for you to believe a stock (or futures contract) can become an ATM machine once it's studied very carefully for a period of time and prime setups are played. Or you can find someone expert at it to teach you and save you the time of doing all the work and study on your own, but doing it yourself you get a feel for what's most comfortable for you.
What you are saying is spot on, dont let some idiot like Stock777 deter your thoughts, i still to this day pay attention to three or four stocks, while i wait for my screens to present other viable opportunities, and I often build systems based on patterns i see on these 3-4 stocks.
You can trade only a few stocks and be good at predicting their short term movements and be able to profit from them. They can be AAPL, or AMZN, or POT, or AIG, or GS, or CSCO MSFT DELL you name it. In the Internet boom, it used to be AMZN CSCO KLAC AMAT EMLX. Or even Iomega. The key to look for is liquidity and volatility. The daily churns. The higher the churn the better. You do need to be careful with the low floats. Low floats typically lead to high spreads and erratic moves. I like to watch a basket of 4 to 5 stocks side-by-side and compare them to the movements of S&P. There I play relative strength. If S&P drops but stock ABC doesn't move... look for S&P to bottom and bounce then long ABC. If S&P moves up but ABC hardly moves... look for S&P to top out and short ABC. I can do this all day long. I change my focus stock over time. In 2008 I loved SKF but it died since Q2 09. I traded FAS full time since it reversed split 1:10 but now it died down with the stupid 3:1 split. (They just can't leave it alone.) I have been playing AAPL since. RIMM was great when it was over $200 until they stupidly split it 3:1 and the liquidity died. I don't like to see stock splits. They work better for me if they don't. (Though I am not a fan of BRK.A because nobody "trades" it.)
i agree w/don here, i have been trading this way for some time. Two things, as you gain exp with one find and add another to your list. Also, have a sharp eye for when your stock changes and is "out of play". FSLR i have been playing since it IPO and it is a huge advantage when you learn the reactions(price action) to the stock.
yup, RIMM only trades 13 million a day last 3m avg, way too little for the whales here than need to print 50k blocks. no liquidity indeed . what was hello goodbyes nick before he had to switch?
I'm just curious why nobody has mentioned SPY as one of their daily trading "stocks". It has a lot of these same specs as some of the other expensive stocks mentioned, and the spreads are rarely more then 1 penny apart. The liquidity is superior to any stock, a bit more then half a million shares a min on average, so scaling up would be no problem. Is it just more unpredictable because its an index, thus more factors affect it or what is it? If one can learn how to trade any stock over and over again, would SPY be any different?
IMHO individual stocks are just easier to trade than indexes. Maybe there's some news story out and you know how this influences your particular stock, but it's very vague if this is good or bad for the market as a whole. Also you can know how undersold/oversold a stock is just by looking at it, very useful. There also is a social quality to stocks where you can say to people "Hey what do you think of Apple" at least in my world (I'm a software engineer) whereas noone has an opinion on the indexes really.