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

- Niels Henrik David Bohr

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

End of Day Journal (4-7-2010)

What a day today.

I still feel like I am trying to learn the ropes and working thru logistics. In times of low volatility, I need to maintain good entry habits. Part of me thinks the lack of discipline is due to the paper trading environment, it feels too much like an experiment - is this entry going to work? It might. Well, why not go for it? So I go for it.

But who am I kidding? If I can't practice the discipline while paper trading, I have my doubts about whether I should be applying this strategy to real trading.

What does this say about me? Well, it might speak to my lack of discipline and concentration skills. Or it might mean that I just really suck at this and am just blaming paper trades. According to my real trading record thus far, I really suck at this.

What are my paper trades saying? I really suck at this. Well, maybe not really. But it does say I am too eager for entry. Here are the results:


Two things to note on this. most of the losses are from the morning session. The two largest losses (PXP and ATHN) were afternoon losses when everything was going nuts, and I started buying everything that came up... crazy times, crazy goodness. That was a wild ride - the screener starts going crazy, colors start changing, everything looks good - I just kept entering positions. I finally just started exiting to clear up the portfolio window. I shouldn't have loss on either position, but I just had too much open. I would post the trades, but they don't fit on one window - something like 60? Two positions I scaled in when I shouldn't have, which proceeded to wipe the small gains.

The second thing - and I said this yesterday - I need to wait for these opportunities, let them come, and be ready for them.

No more than two positions at a time for this noob, and more judicious entry timing. 

On that front, I spent a surprisingly amount of time working on the screeners again. This needs to be done during market hours so I can see the results, so quite a bit of experimenting today. Trying to signal potential movers, and simplify the display as much as possible. When things started moving this afternoon, I had way too much information to take in, which made me a little trigger happy.

Tomorrow - dissertation research day, so no paper trades. Back to work.

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