"An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field."

- Niels Henrik David Bohr

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

End of Day Journal (1-12-2010)

Pinch me. I must still be a rooky - this feels like the first 2 weeks of trading 10 years ago. Except... I hadn't loss >30% of my initial investment already, and I didn't have the backtesting record, or the historical 'what if' charts. 6 out of the 7 last days positive.
Today was a confidence day - no doubt. The chart of 'What-ifs' coupled with the exhaustive backtesting gives me enough confidence in the buy point to refrain from selling on the downdrafts. Today and yesterday.

Selling:


I sold out of one position that I had entered this morning; it had dipped, I doubled the stakes, and road it back up. This stock was not on yesterday or today's screener, but it had been a couple of days ago (and I had bought and sold). But - I was looking at the what-if data last night, and there have been a lot of stocks climbing into the 30-40% range after I sold. This one seemed to fit the bill, so I marked it this morning, and timed it right.

Buying:


I bought a lot today. The two round trips, another that had been on the screener yesterday (which did not perform well today), another that I had marked from a couple of days ago, one early screen (which went down far enough to almost completely wipe gains today), another dip into the first two round trips, and one at end of day. Almost makes me nervous going to bed tonight with 90% invested.

What ifs:


Heh - I couldn't have asked for a better day. Except for the low volume stock from yesterday's screen - that was a mistake... it would have been a good buy yesterday, but I jumped the gun this morning.

Time Spent:


I couldn't find a stop watch that worked, so nothing official again. I am sure I spent at least 4 hours off and on today watching the charts. But - I managed to get all of my outstanding work caught up and hold several chat, email, and phone conversations. I need to be more disciplined about this - and count off-market time, to get a better gage on overall time spent. I have been wracking my brain trying to define the optimization problem for the stop-loss, and still am not satisfied with it.

I have a very good feeling about two of the stocks in the portfolio - based on the historicals. We shall see.

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