End of Day Journal (4-19-2010)

Crazy busy weekend.

Friday saw a +$2200 paper trading day. The day ended up only being the morning session, as my ISP was having problems during the afternoon. This also prevented me from posting before heading out of town late Friday. Lots of in and outs, and one bad stop. Overall a great exercise - the ISP going down forced me to check into what would happen if the service went down while trading live. I think I have everything in place now.

I meant to paper trade for the most part today as well, while keeping the income account open for anything that looked very good. Unfortunately, I had re-set the paper amount on Friday morning, but was left holding a position when the ISP went down, so this morning saw the account with no margin available. I couldn't place one trade. I re-set the account again and watched for opportunities.

Three trades for ~+$1300:

Here are the charts in all of their glory.


I went short on ANF and almost got stopped out. I think I need to pay attention to and be ready for the dr4op in action and potential exits ~ the 12:00 p.m. mark, I covered a little on the late side:

The afternoon session saw  a lot of potentials. I picked RCl with a short at ~14:00, but covered and reversed 10 minutes later. The reverse was a little early, but QQQQ was showing strength:

For some reason I cannot see the short entry on the chart. I am not liking these charts very much.

Good day for me. But strangely enough, I was not all that giddy about it. Realizing that I happened to be at the right place and ready for the swing - and ready to be wrong - has a strangely calming effect. I caught myself several times today watching the profit rising and thinking along the lines  of - 'What is my profit target?' Heh. At least three or four times on RCL. Each time I made a conscious effort to get my mind off of the profit, take it patiently, and let the stock tell me when to get out. Fully expecting that anything can happen is an awesome place to be.

Paper trading the rest of the week. If things go well, I may place enough money in the account to meet the day trading requirements.

Oh yeah - here is the account chart: