But... another day below the targeted average: today brought the daily average down to $528.08, with the weekly hovering at $1584.23.
Selling:
My account only had one position to liquidate - the one I was kicking myself for not selling yesterday... I generally start the day with a relatively high sell price, anticipating a morning jump. Ready for the day's fresh perspective, I was greeted with low volumes and a dropping price. By mid-day I changed the order to a penny above current bid. About a third of the shares sold for what happened to be just off of the low for the day. I realized a 3.2% loss on the 700 shares.
Buying:
Two stocks showed up on the screener, but both again with low volumes. One with a relatively high volume and a lot of enthusiasm, but I refrained from buying both. This is the third day in a row for a low number of buy candidates, and I find myself wondering if I should change the screener criteria. That would probably be a little hasty - it is probably reasonable to expect times in the market where it is just not good to buy in. I don't recall trying express a 'do not buy period' in the screener criteria, but maybe it works out. I will stick with my backtesting results for now.
What ifs:
An hour after I sold a third of the shares and with the price seemingly stalled, I withdrew my sell offering, and posted another sell at a ridiculously higher price. It is doubtful that what I did had anything to do with what happened next, but who knows? The price started to come back up on significant volumes, in fact, it came up to the price that I had initially set as the start of the day sell price. Of course, by then I had followed the price up and was trying to sell for slightly higher - I am sure the fact that I had sold for so much lower earlier didn't help matters. I ended up missing the sale, with the stock dropping back down to close almost exactly where it had opened.
Funky. The when-to-sell question is a tough one. Today's price action (and my reaction) is comparatively tame to what I went thru when I was trying to trade on extremely short time frames. I have to ask - what is driving trades during the day? A simple answer is people - and most everyone looking at the same information and deciding something. Part of me wants to analyze the price action and my response to death, but at the end of the day, what it might come down to is some confidence - confidence in the analysis behind the strategy.
Confidence in a strategy is a tough sell, even in trying to sell it to myself - there are plenty of times that my confidence and optimism did not serve well - at all. In hindsight however, I think this had more to do with confidence in a very short term trading strategy, which was just not a good idea.
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