Another tough day But I did a better job of trading. I just was stopped out over and over. I also made a point to go to bed early and get a full night sleep. STE overbought + 51 LXK traded back and forth both long and short. started out losing several times from getting stopped out. Later in the day I went long and made some of it back. Finally, went short near the close but stopped out but it was a very small stoploss. Traded pretty large in some of the trades and if any of them would have really moved it would have made the difference in having a gain for the day. â 200 ANN Was like LXK but at first I had a small gain. Traded it back and forth and stopped out. Also let a short go further than was wise and that gave the bulk of the loss. â 231 CS beat me up everytime I traded it getting stopped out several times. â 191 Not a totally bad day considering. Had any of the trend trades (does not include STE) kept going it would have been a gain for the day. I need to manage trades like ANN a little better but I gave myself a chance to make some large gains - 571 - 2780 Month
I'm not sure if he was reporting the trades that he held overnight. I notice that a another trader on ET had very consistent profits and did not report the losses that were being held overnight until they closed out the trade. That's when the big losses showed up. It was ok to hold those shorts overnight when they worked in 2008 & 2007, the traders that did that started having problems last year.
Good point All trades are reported when realized both gains and negatives. Last year I held GE and LVS stock/options for months along with some others for shorter periods of time that had gains but I never posted them until the gain was realized. I also carried over some unrealized losses overnight but once realized they were reported on the day of being realized. With that being said I did miss some gains that were in afterhours trading but the only ones I didn't post were gains, always posted my losses so that I would never have to deal with anyone saying I was hiding losses. So my gains were actually better last year and to a very small amount this year than what was posted as well Best to you Robert
Hang in there, Robert. To use a cliche, trading is a journey, not a destination (I have no idea what it means, I guess it might be relevant, so I am saying it to give you some enouragement ) To tell the truth, my day was tougher than yours, I missed a lot of money.
Thanks for the reply Robert. I know you don't hide losses, you are one of the few people that I follow on ET. I was just pointing out that you don't report all the trades each day until the trade is closed. Good luck Robert, you are my inspiration!
Thanks and I didn't take it negatively. I thought it was good to point it out though and so I thank you Best to you Robert
Took another look Last night before going home I asked myself the all important question when things are not going well. What changed from last year at this time to this year? Was the market different or was I different. I came up with that I am different and the markets are the same in terms of offering oppertunities in the way I prefer to trade. I thought perhaps I have âcurve fittedâ my main signal to the point where I am not getting any more signals. The major changes took place after I was given some advise to not fade overboughts and to just enter in fully at a better point. I tried to do that and spent a lot of time looking at the charts and actually came up with some very good improvements. So good in fact that its pretty common lately when I do get a signal to hit the very top. The numbers of trades that really move against me fell by a very large percentage. Sounds all good but there was two problems. Once in a while (although much less so) they still run against me so I canât âdrop the hammerâ anyway and the second more important thing is I went to having one or more signals on any given day last year at this time and I have fallen to less than two per week (perhaps less than one per week). So while the improvements did help my trades that I did get my overall gains went down because it was better to take a few large hits once in a while (like a weeks worth of gains every month or more) then to almost never take a hit and lose out of all the good trades. So I stayed up very late last night working on doing a comparison of preveous versions of my main overbought signal and I found that I wanted to take the best of both and adjust it once again in a major way. I started it last night and will be working on it for the next couple of weeks. In the mean time I am running as best I can both signals on my scanner. I think if I go back to my trading like summer of 09 minus the scalping that was a net large loser I will be on the right track for the rest of the year. Especially after the adjustments that keep me from the worst of the worst. With all that I didnât get any overbought signals that I traded. I did get one fully qualified but I didnât have the alarm setup correctly and when it went off in premarket due to it signaling yesterday it didnât automatically reset. I wish that was the default for TS instead of having to remember to change the setting. Otherwise today was a pretty good day. NETL started out the day with a gap up. I could have traded it better but did âBâ work. An âAâ would have been much better but I handled the exit well so I am ok with it. Best trade of the day in terms of gains. + 489 LXK was perhaps the strangest and it became strange as I wrote this. In after hours trading the ask fell by about 15 cents (was almost totally dead in activity) and did so in very large size and at multiple levels. I had a bid to cover at 32.01 or so and the ask came down to 32.12 and I thought I would take the 200 shares off the table and be flat overnight. I do think the odds favor it falling further but it was a quick 20 cent gain and if it goes higher at the open I can fade that. I moved my bid up to the ask and sure enough nothing happened. I hate when an offer is âfakeâ or IB is making errors. There was another offer at the next tic and I moved my bid to that and I was filled at the second ask. I traded LXK several times today and at one point I was short and about to bail on it and then it gave me an overbought unqualified signal and so I traded around the basis and ended up making a little bit on it when otherwise I would have taken a hit of maybe $300. As it was I did get stopped out of some and some my gain was not very large + 106 AMED WW long at support and it fell through so I took a stop. I wanted to take a different stop but my stop loss didnât fire with IB. Really sucks because it then fell much further while I was trying to manually stop out. Really poor on the software of IB. As I worked to get stopped out AMED moved back into my favor so the end result was my stop loss was not as bad as it wouldhave otherwise been but I would rather have software that did what it is supposed to do instead of playing the luck game. Had I not been watching it I could really have been hurt as it feel much further before it did finally come back. â 8 APKT was a market maker dream stock today. Back and forth right at the same price for much of the day and slow moves for the most part when it did move. I did ok considering I was short but I traded a lot of shares (on purpose) to get there. Otherwise it never retraced to make anything on the gap up but I didnât lose any either. I came back at it later in the day and added a small amount to the gain. + 126 CSCO Afterhours trade long with the trend after earnings came out. small 200 shares for a quick grab. + 46 SWK was the best looking trade of the day. I shorted it just before it fell off the cliff around 1030AM CST. I caught a large amount of the move for the few shares that I did have in the trade. I am still not comfortable putting any size on these types of trades and keeping the size on for the bulk of the move. That is an area I could work on. I did manage to cover some near the bottom of the move and stopped out correctly on the remainder. + 245 TM was a fade of the Fed news. GS downgraded it shortly after but it didnât get beat up to bad from that but enough for me to stop out. I took another small whack at it when sure enough the feds backpeddled their statements (that wasnât hard to see coming). I was just trading 100 shares at a time and one one a scalp + 45 ZAGG was a breakout long cheap lotto ticket. Never went far and when it retraced I stopped out just above even + 4 Now flat thanks to the strange LXK offer + 1055 - 1725 Month