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

- Niels Henrik David Bohr

Monday, February 1, 2010

End of daty journal (2-1-2010)

 




Comments:
Another month. I didn't have as much time over the weekend to do all the analysis that I wanted to; family, friends, and life all beckoned. And I had to prep for some substitute teaching this week.

But the new month - I am meeting February with a lot of trepidation and intimidation. The account value is very close to the 25k margin requirement. After being up over 20% I completely blew it the last two weeks of the month. Was the success just a fluke?

Hopefully today is a precursor for the rest of the month. As it turns out I sold BEXP a little early, but hit LYV perfectly for the day. I was tempted to enter several other positions during the course of the day, but quite frankly, I am a little gun shy and just not at all sure what to expect from this market. I stayed away until the end of the day. APWR still managed to meet the sell criteria before the end of day making it an intraday roundtrip.

The analysis that I was able to conduct was pretty much inconclusive - in fact, the profit and loss sell stops both fell out as well. The market is a wild beast. But I did come away with another idea that I think warrants additional analysis. The fact is, no one can predict the market and it would seem that a definite stop loss would be in order. I am not sure how that is going to turn out yet. Another thing to consider is the idea of measuring the profit not in terms of the purchase price of the stock, but in terms of the daily change in account value; e.g. say I mis-read the market again and hold my positions rather than selling. My hunch is that it would be better to set a profitable sell point from the start of day value.

Hopefully I can post  my thoughts on January and additional analysis soon. 

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