Didn’t pull the trigger on it, but there was a nice short move on ANR just before noon today. I’d called it on paper but wasn’t sure what the proper trigger was.
Given a downtrending market, the 9/12/26 MACD sell signal on the 5 minute chart would’ve just been beautiful.
Currently it’s bouncing off of the $100 line, which makes sense. That would’ve been a near 2% move for 20 minutes work.
So I had my first “loss to platform technical issue” today. It was a short position in WDC that I was going to take for a nice $0.20 cents (believe it or not that amounts to real money.)
Now one can say it’s a poor craftsman who blames his tools. But that doesn’t tend to apply for tools that fly apart.
So I’ve shut down trading for the day until I get confirmations that their selective lag issue (quotes are fine, charts are not) is cleared up. I’d made some really nice “yeah, I can do this for a living, that wasn’t that hard” trades under my belt.
All in all it was a damn good day, that aside. CIT and WDC were the only things I had positions in.
Posting about trading’s been light because it’s been uneventful. I usually have a couple solid positions to the good early in the trading day. Every once in a while I “try something a little different” as I’m technically “in school” for the next couple/few weeks. Sometimes that backfires with a lesson learned.
Sometimes my mind is elsewhere ;-) But that’s not a topic for here.
…mmm… elsewhere…
But I’m finding out that despite my initial conviction that it wasn’t so, my temperament is really that of the twitchy day trader. It’s the style of trading I’m so far best at and I’m fighting it less and less. Problem is (or… ‘may be’… hell if I know) that my reading had always been focused on swing trading, so I’m in this weird area where I’m training myself off the style of trading I’d learned by circumstances.
It’s good in a way because it forces me to learn to day trade with enough of a theoretical background that I’ve actually got a basis for doing it. If I’d started off by reading a bunch of books on day trading I’m positive I would be in a much worse spot.
Now I can go back and do that research.
Mikey?
Yeah.
Mikey’s not that stupid and as such is markedly up on the day without having gone short.
Ha ha, I win ;-)
I’m pretty sure if you put a gun to my head and said “you can only trade one equity for the rest of your life” I’d trade US Steel and be one happy monkey.
I was three positions to the good on them. Plus, I took some money from Western Digital, CLF, and TS. I blew it on Cisco, but only to the tune of $0.08 on the share and I think I understand the problem.
One loss (of $0.01/share) was due to a bad trade entry on my part and the other loss (on ICE) was due to me not having my damn trading rules published (in this case, everything looked great but I forgot to check volume and the equity subsequently fell like a stone.)
Damn good day.
I’m going to increase my unit size again tomorrow.
7 out of 11 positions were to the good. I had a couple finger-crossing plays that bit me in the ass uniformly. But I feel like I’ve been at this for 3 straight days. I’m moving back and forth watching a couple dozen equities at a time all day and good god is it exhausting. I made some points on all of those instruments mentioned in the title, sometimes more than once over the scope of the trading day. Out of all this I’m learning rather remarkably quickly. Unfortunately this is all taking so much energy and focus that this site has become a day-trading diary. I just don’t have the energy at the end of this to blog normally. I’ll share a couple of my new substantive rules (and the word “rule” is of questionable but significant strength.)
The fun play today was UNP, Union Pacific. I don’t recall why it was on the watch list. But I bought in to it a little before noon. I have a trailing stop, but that’s just a protection measure. Usually I sell manually, then cancel the stop. I’m not quite that quick at it yet. I manually sold the UNP at $76.04, so I tried to race over and cancel the stop, but I replaced it with a sell (and I was flat) so I shorted it at $76.03. It was my first short position ever, so I was panicked. But I was only in a small lot so I thought I’d ride it as it really was going down. I bought to cover and ended up being a few bucks to the good. It’s like crack. It was an accident that turned to the good. But it did get me thinking along those lines, so I’ve got to start paying attention to the other side of these trades. How confident am I in my sell points? How often am I selling at the top of the move instead of just taking some money off the table as the equity goes north? Should be interesting. Unlike getting in to derivative instruments, I’m actually excited to get in to the short side. I just have to get used to seeing it correctly. So I’m 7 out of 11 positions to the good on a DOWN day. I’m getting better at this. My action failures are easily understood for the most part. My INaction failures are tougher to diagnose of course. If I was more confident (and subsequently made more trades) I’m not sure how I’d end up. But I do take notes on things I’m looking at while I’m looking at them so as not to salt the dig. (Any asshole can look at day’s top performers and say “I would’ve hit that”.) I’m not sure if I’m writing the right things down yet. So we’ll see. There are only two important things right now:
And I think I’m doing both pretty well so far. The difference between now and a week ago is significant.
It’s like they have no other argument.
All week I’ve been hearing democrat bobbleheads say “but drilling won’t solve the problem so we shouldn’t do it.”
I don’t hear anybody on my side arguing against alternative fuels. Nobody. But there isn’t even a feigned counter against more drilling. The only thing they have to say is that it won’t solve all the problem so we shouldn’t do any of it.
It’s fucking weak and I don’t know why the hell people believe this shit.
Is it really just stomping and whining about the enviiirroonnnmeennntt? If that was it then they’d say it, believing their own bullshit enough to feel it should compel others. But they don’t.
It’s gotten to the point where they don’t even say it wouldn’t help; just that it wouldn’t help ENOUGH.
Stand aside morons. There’s work to be done.
One of the greatest resources online for business technical data, from fundamental statistics to historical stock data is Yahoo Finance. It’s got a truly amazing array of stats.
One of the things I do to pick my watch list for the day is to look at the leading industries by intra-day price movement. Yahoo has a wonderful page for that over here. But for the better part of the last week or so I’d been trying to figure out why the big movers weren’t really showing up there. I was getting to the best instruments a little too late in the game.
In order to chart a price change you have to decide what you’re comparing it with. For intra-day statistics that usually means you have to pick between yesterday’s closing price and today’s opening price.
The sensible number from 10,000 feet is yesterday’s closing price. But what happens is that after-hours trading can radically smack the price of an instrument around on very little volume, creating what look like large price moves, but ones that are essentially meaningless.
So the next day industries get ranked based on price moves that include these phantom changes. Again, this works itself out on the large scale. But when you’re looking at the market at a minute-to-minute time scale it’s utterly useless.
Fortunately I’ve realized it pretty early on. While it never really pushed me to a bad trade, it kept me from an awful lot of good ones.
So now I’m looking for another watch list seeding ground to add to my couple others and replace this biggie.
In The Before Time I shared a house with 4 other guys. No no, it was worse.
One of the things we did was play chess. We were all pretty much in the same league so it was actually a fair bit of fun (we weren’t really any GOOD at, but that’s a different issue.) As we were learning a couple of us developed some pretty particular affinities. I really loved working with bishops, for instance. I found that other beginning players had a bit of trouble with the diagonals and I capitalized on that relatively well.
Another guy who we’ll call Rob because his name is Rob loved making broad, dramatic moves with his rook or queen. Again, given the audience that was selectively effective at basic intimidation.
We figured out each other’s particularities and sort of stalled our progress.
But this morning I was watching RIMM take off like it was shot out of a canon. Eyes wide I pounced on it.
One problem I’ve mentioned is that I’m pretty grossly intolerant of drawdowns. When you’re in an equity for timespans of 2 and 3 minutes on average, red bars are panic inducing. It’s caused me to lose big pieces of moves, even when I end up out to the good. So I figured I’d take the hint and put my stop way down instead of a hugging $0.03 like I usually do.
Now, we all know where this is going. I lost $0.85 on the dollar as RIMM turned south just as I heard the “fill” sound effect.
So, no more of that.
I’ve made some lucky plays on pure momentum, granted. But without a preponderance of positive evidence, it’s a mistake. I shouldn’t ever have to cross my fingers when I hit buy.
The other thing that happens is that I start getting emotionally invested in the issue. So I’m considering enacting a “no consecutive positions in a single equity” rule. That might be a bit heavy handed though.
Once burned, I came back and made a nice, very well calculated move on Mentorgraphics, which does my geeky heart good and restored my standing on the day, which was generally flat overall.
Something I read on a trading blog after I made that mistake (it was probably Trader Mike) was that “increasing price on decreasing volume is bearish.” I looked back at the morning RIMM chart, laughed, and added a new rule :-) Turns out I bought on a truly solid sell signal.
Most of the day I spent (nursing my torqued neck) working on some custom indicators for the Think Or Swim platform. (Looking to graph correlating movement directions in price and volume as a 101 of writing custom indicators.)
Today was a pretty damn good day. In fact if I’d kept my head about me it would’ve been a far better day than Thursday. Unfortunately I was whipped up into a lather and made a couple bad trades.
The big wins were WDC and RIMM. XMSR was behaving pretty funny, but I ended up just a hair under flat on that issue.
No, it was RIMM towards the end of the trading session that had my head scrambled. I was taking their money again and again and again. The first couple were good solid moves. Sure, I missed some of the upswing by being a little tight with my stops, but I’m very happy with that. However, I was doing so well that I lost my head a bit and started making a few twitchy trades on very little basis and of course I got burned.
I’m thinking about ways to counter that impulse but my sense of it is that “getting burned” is really the best way to handle it. I do engage in the practice of writing out my thoughts on each position and trade event after I’m out of the position, then a bit more extensively at the end of the day; and it’s giving me some rules that appear to be pretty sensible.
One thing I’m finding (and I think what cause the XMSR trouble) is that the higher the share price the better. Well… perhaps that’s misleading. In general that’s true. Of course I only have so much cash to work with, so there’s an upper bound. But much to my surprise I’m really quite liking the kind of price moves in a volatile issue trading in the $100+ range.
I’m not really looking at “percentage” as a measure of trade success so much as flat dollar moves. A higher share price is going to support bigger penny swings per share than smaller issues. Combine that with a large trading volume and I find myself in a much more fluid, easy to work with environment.
I’m becoming noticeably better at this in short order.
Rough couple days. I made some world class bad decisions on the market yesterday. I knew they were bad decisions up front, but i was pissed about having been stopped out early and missed a great (read: $1400) move.
Eventually I realized what I’d done and I stepped off for the rest of the day.
I’ve backed off of my trading unit size starting on Monday (I’m away for the weekend and off the desk) and I’m going back to some basics and re-establishing some of my hard overall rules.
No real details yet, but I’ll probably sketch something out.
I got an interesting comment on my previous post, about the day’s successes. Go read, I’ll wait.
On one hand, it never occurred to me to “trade blog” past the point where trading was a decoration to my day that warranted relation here. So the notion that someone would find or seek to find this stuff useful isn’t really one I thought about.
But it leaves me in this fairly strange position.
After years of reading and about 9-12 months of exceptionally successful swing trading (wherein you maintain positions for short but usually multi-day terms, 3 days to 3 weeks ish) I thought that was going to be what I would be doing.
Somewhere in the back of my head though I know that I’m a remarkably twitchy fellow and that I have a temperament which just might be very well suited towards day trading which is a whole different beast.
Day trading, especially on a primarily technical-analysis basis, is very chart driven. It looks from the outside like completely random black magic. Frankly if you believe it thus, then trying to engage in the practice will lead you to predictable ruin.
I’ve found myself scalping three and four minute moves to the tune of $0.20 per share and being very successful at it.
But as for the specifics on what leads me to a particular equity and the formative criteria that rings the “buy now” bell in my head…
…well, you’ll have to just make your best guess. I’m putting enough pressure on these things in their given timespan with the volumes I’m trading to actually move price. It would be fundamentally detrimental for me to share my criteria.
But I’m a beginner at this level of microtrading, so I might have that wrong. I’m rather inclined to share my thoughts (really, ask anyone whom I’ve been able to corner) and so the notion that this can become a useful resource for other people is an intriguing one; though I’ll have to dip my toe in gently as far as what I feel comfortable about and what would constitute tipping my hand.
“Besides, I’ve been through too much over this case already to just go and hand it over to your dumb ass.”
This is all an amazing process I’ve got to say. I’ve paid more attention to what I’ve been doing in the last week and a half than I have had any reason to in the previous ten years of professional life combined.
So no, there will be no ‘retreat to safety.’ I will never work in a cubicle again. No more fluorescent lights. No more pretending to give a rat’s ass about how the company performs. No more cell phone calls at odd hours by delusional jackasses who are laboring under some misunderstanding that they might have some leverage over me.
That’s not to say I’m afraid to fail. I do have the contingency outline roughly drawn in my head. But only roughly.
Because it’s not going to happen.
Yeah. With the exception of KMGB which was a dumbass play, I made money on all of those. I average about 4 minutes in a position. I ain’t tellin’ my ins and outs. My block trade size has been going steadily up for the past 3 days as I get my feet wet, so the return on these nickle & dime moves (literally) has been going up geometrically and will continue to do so for a bit.
At the outside of that I’ll run into an issue so I’m working on a couple multi-order triggers so that I can maintain more than one position at a time, which will be instrumental in diversifying into several equities with smaller stakes so as not to shove the market around (as I found even I have the capability of doing on low ADV instruments.)
To have made the amount of money today, on a day that was just down all over, well… yes it could be incredible luck.
But it ain’t.
So I lost some money on coke this morning.
About noon or so I saw some interesting movement and decided to jump in and play, experimenting with a change in a strategy that’s been biting me in the ass, and not in a fun way.
The result?
Well…
Just heard the ceo of Take-Two Interactive say they’re working on a movie deal for BioShock.
*blink* *blink*
Employment numbers nasty, pulling the world down.
I usually just accrete notes throughout the day then post later. But this market is going fucking batshit today.
Oil now has it’s two largest dollar value (not percentage value, which would make much more sense) moves of ALL time on back to back days (down yesterday, up today.)
Chevron is the only DOW stock going up.
The intraday industry “leaders & laggards” page on yahoo biz which I adore so much has an industry that’s DOWN 0.04% in it’s leaders list. (note, this is as I’m looking at it a bit before 11:00. no idea what it’ll be when I hit post.)
I’m just not fluid enough in the next level up from basic trading to know how to make the contrarian play.
This shit is like crack.
Still waiting on live funding in ThinkOrSwim because of the way I’m setting up my account.
I found some stuff interesting today.
Steel & Iron was awesome today.
Cramer was on CNBC and gave some picks for international plays. Knowing how much the public loves Cramer I hovered over the buy button, which paid off. I hit SLT at $20.87, then with a trailing stop got out at $21.09, then back in when it drew down to $21.02 then out again at $21.38, for a really nice piece of dinner money for about 20 minutes work.
On CNBC there was an interesting tidbit of information:
2 pounds of corn feeds 1 pound of chicken. But it takes 4 pounds of corn for 1 pound of pork. I’m not really in to the commodities world yet (though with energy the way it’s playing out there’s little chance of avoiding it) but it’s interesting to see where these interdependencies are.
So the net on the day is that I’ve got a couple ideas on pure technical trades which, because I’m sitting here in the command chair is gaining more focus than I’d intended. It’s ok if I can make it work.
I think the challenge is going to be splitting my cash between long and short term positions and judging them on their own criteria without much bleedover.
Of course maybe I’m just going to end up a day trader which frankly wouldn’t fucking suck if it went the way I think it’ll go.
Fun stuff.
WDC - Hard drive manufacturer. Doing really well today, not sure if it’s a news play or not. I love the company and the product. Might’ve missed the move, tough to tell.
Michelin: New product line for decreasing weight of 18 wheelers. Better fuel economy, significant increase in resilience against blowouts and other malfunctions. Why can’t I get the ticker? I’m dying to see the chart. There’s a play here.
GM would’ve been nice to get in front of since everybody knew what the announcement was going to be. But I think I should’ve put my (currently fake until the account is funded) money on it last night.
Tue Jun 03 15:32:02 2008: NVDA (Nvidia) I like the chart as of now. Looks like a intra-day consolodation. I like the ticker in general. great product, market leaders in their space. Prediction: Good short-term play and we’ll see something big from them in the next couple months, worth getting on board. If I knew more I’d say accumulate some on dips over the next couple months, ride it through January.
Interesting point on the “speculators are manipulating commodities” crap:
I just heard something on CNBC interesting enough to get me up to write it up to solidify it in my head.
There’s a lot of buzz over the past few days around the effect speculators may be having on the commodity markets. People are looking to place blame on “those naughty investors” per usual.
“speculators” are not “permanent buyers” because when the contract rollovers occur, they MUST sell the expiring contracts and MUST buy the new ones to hold their position. It’s not like they’re buying and holding equities, driving the prices up.
So the notion that they’re exerting constant bullish pressure on the commodities markets is fundamentally false.
When explained it’s so bloody obvious.
The fact that I feel like I’ve been put through a wood chipper aside. Some thoughts:
I picked out the Avant move prior to it’s actual occurrence. However, the low-volume sideways movement that took place after the initial burst and mild retracement I had trouble seeing. I’m just not sure how to have targeted what was going on with that, if indeed it was possible.
It burst up over the last 15 minutes towards close on remarkable volume. It could’ve been someone collecting a big position at the end of the day or just some sort of EOD run-up phenomenon with which I’m not yet familiar. (ADV is 72k. Today’s volume was 7.2 M, and the eod burst accounted for something close to a half million shares of accumulation (just eyeballing that number).) So I’ll have to see what if anything that means.
Gamestop (GME) looked pretty slick today too, especially considering the market direction.
Frankly I ignored the financial news as far as what I was tracking through the day. It was just too tumultuous for me to do anything other than listen to what was going on and trying to absorb some of the punditry.
On the other side of things, the Think Or Swim platform is just awesome. I can easily find a home there and indeed I’ve set up the process to move bunch of cash into that account. I may take up another account or two just to test competing platforms. Tough to tell though.
In my delirium I left my notebook upstate, so my list of research points are things I’ll have to wait on. But I’ve got a significant number of ideas.
Going forward, I don’t know how much of my thoughts I’m going to put here. Frankly I’m working on refining a trading strategy and the details of it are simply not for public consumption.
Time to venture forth for some chicken soup. Though I’ve no idea how the hell I’ll make it seeing as how I have no gas. :-/
