I have to give up soon. Was at -3K in my account yesterday, but now -7.5K. I keep shorting WM and it keeps going up. I am now convinced it will hit $100/share next week. Too bad I don't have any cash to buy it. Now WM is off it's high for the day, and I've still lost money shorting it. I short it, put in my stop. Then it goes up high enough to trigger my stop and goes back down. I swear they are targeting me. Is it because of the huge # of shares I'm trading? Maybe that's why they like me. I really want to try to get a few winning trades to get my account of out debt, but at this rate I might be -30K in a week. I might just need to liquidate 7.5K of stock to cover that -7.5K of debt. Time for me to write my program to automate my trading strategy, except I'll have the program issue a buy order when my strategy says to sell, and a sell order when my strategy says to buy. I'm going to be a millionaire by year end.
Wow, so I haven't placed any trades in the last hour, and WM has been in a really tight range during that time. They really need me to place a trade so they know which direction to go. Otherwise they are confused.
You need open account under another name by another broker. Then place the 100 share long by your old broker and 1000 short by new broker ...
read the post by TraderNik on page 3 man!!! You don't seem to "get it". You can't trade the size your trading with your account, not to mention your lack of skill and experience. I'll give you examples of what I do and some money management as well: 1. Ask yourself before every trade, " how much am I willing to lose"....I once took a 50K account to 142K in 1 year never risking more than $500 a trade. 2. Then, pick a spot where you'll stop out. For example, if I'm willing to lose $500 and the stock is at $90.00 and the LOD is 89.65 then a reasonable stop would be around 89.65. Thats .35. $500/.35 means I can trade 1400 shares. I can't stress this point enough. Risk vs Reward. You HAVE to know how much your willing to risk. If you can't see where to place your stop(i.e. that point where your probably wrong about the trade and should get out) don't make the trade, or make it using super small size. The better defined the stop area is and the closer it is to your entry the more shares you can trade. 3. Make sure the stock is liquid enough to get out fast if necessary. A stock that trades 50K or even 1m a day, but on the thin side, won't like 1400 hitting the bid all at once. 4. Stop being an emotional pussy and start trading like a thinking human being. Not bashing you, just smackin you to get your attention for point 5 5. Understand that the key to successful trading is small loses and big gains. In fact, most of your gains over a year will come from just a small percentage of your total trades. 6. Here's some ideas on how to maximize wins and minimize losses, in additon to what I've already said. --say you have 1000 shares of a 20.00 stock. Your max loss is $500(.50). Set your stop at 19.50. Say the stock goes up .50. Here's a couple things I do. Keep in mind alot of trading is instinct and feel. There's no magic 1 way that always works best. Anyway, stocks up .50. I might sell 500shrs and move my stop up to 20.00. Worst I can do now is make $250. Or I might sell 300 and move stop to 20.00 Or I might not sell any and move stop to 20.00 Or I might sell all and walk away. The point is, I rarely let a decent winner turn into a loser, let alone a big loser. And you shouldn't either. 7. Learn about relative strength. I don't care what anyone says, RS is without question the single most important part of identifying stocks to trade and when to trade them. 8. Stop chasing moves. When you short a stock like you did WM because it's falling thats stupid. If I've missed the plunge then I would sit back and wait for a big increase in volume on a 5 minute bar and go long the bounce with a stop at the recent low. Assuming ,of course, I even want to get invovled with it in the first place. I find that when the markets strong I make money shorting low RS laggards. When the markets weak I make money going long stocks that are getting killed on super hi volume. 9. Stop playing for pennies. Daytrading like that will not make you money. Set up and play for real money. I almost never, and I mean NEVER, make a trade unless I think I can't make AT LEAST .50 and usually I'm looking for 1.00 or much, much more. For example, I made 34 trades in Jan. 25 winner's, 9 loser's. 12 of my 25 winner's were for 1.00 or more. 7 were for more than 2.00 and 3 were for more than 5.00. The best was 5.61 and that was made in less than 2 minutes. My worst trade, btw, lost 2.50 and was the only trade of the 9 loser's of more than 1.00. It was also on small size due to the fact that when you trade a stock like BIDU you HAVE to widen your stops just to stay in the trade. BIDU, btw, was also the stock I made 5.61. Win big, lose small 10. Take my advice. You need it, it works and without it you are a slow motion train wreck in progress. Good luck my friend.
Thanks for the reply, Deadwood. I do try to limit my loss to around $1k per trade, but sometimes it ends up being worse than that because WM is pretty volatile and TDAmeritrade can be slow executing my orders. Point #2 makes a lot of sense and I should start following that. Just curious, do you ever hold any positions overnight? Stupid me, I didn't realize until Friday that I can buy stocks even though my account has no cash. Now that I can go long too, I'm really dangerous. Took me 2 weeks to realize the market has reversed trends. Been shorting stocks and getting killed. Now it's time to try to jump on these momentum trains.
Only on very,very rare occassions would I ever hold a stock overnight that I bought/shorted for an intraday trade. And, if I did hold, I would only do so if I was way up and had taken most of the position off the table already. Holding large overnight will kill you sooner or later. Plus, in this market holding size is just silly. Way too much news risk to attempt that, imo. To be honest I hate to even give you trading advice right now. After reading your last post it's obvious your way over your head. the best I could tell you in all seriousness is calm down. I'm really not trying to be mean, I swear. But, you really need to know a lot more than you do before you start throwing real money around. For starters, get rid of Ameritrade. I don't know how anyone could trade successfully using the crappy system. ANd secondly, cut your size back. Once you can show consistent profits and the discipline to control losses THEN add size, but not before. Good luck buddy. Just dont be in a hurry, okay
Appreciate all the replies. Haven't been offended by anything yet. Started the day out at -8.5K, but managed to get it to -5.5K by the close. Daytrading is tough, so I might need to change my strategy to swing trading.
I recommend that you stop trading immediately. From what you have posted, it doesn't look like you will survive normal drawdowns for long.