End of Day Journal (8-23-10) (Day 1 of the Plan)

Summary:

Finished the day at +$51 (200 share lots of  TNA, using the Q's as a basis, paper trading):

It was good to finish positive, but I didn't stick to the trading plan as well as I should have, I think there were two times that I entered with 'I know this is going to happen so I better enter.' I am thinking about it now and scratching my head... I knew what to do today and I didn't, somehow I let my expectations slip into the trading experience. So easy to do.

I decided to do an EOD chart trade comparison to what I traded live today. Here is what could of happened:

 EOD the strategy comes out at +$0.96 per share, while the live trading comes out to about +$0.26 per share. Lots of room for improvement. I posted the details below.

Emotionally I was in a different place today, I think the addition of the trading plan is going to be very helpful.

Details:

This first chart is the EOD sim trade: flagging the signals on the Q's and setting stops on TNA. All the lines are support - included are prior day OHLC, current day OHL, and manually placed lines. It is interesting to note the discrepancies between the Q's and SPY, but I am not sure what, if anything, to make of them yet. For example, the Q's drop below current day open relatively fast, and the SPY picks up some indecision as it reaches the day's open. The SPY then goes onto soundly break thru the prior day low and the Q's touch the prior day low and back off. Maybe a useful pattern will eventually emerge:

Here are the trade points against the live trades:

It was a tough day for this strategy, the big down turn in the morning left no S/R and then the range bound afternoon kept me on the sidelines with respect to drawing S/R lines. I didn't add them while trading live today, but I did trade on them some of the time. I went ahead and added them for the EOD sim trade.

For comparative purposes, the stop arrows (red for the short stops, green for the red stops) match the trade on the following candle, so if there is a trade on the arrow candle it is incorrect. That makes the 7:20, 7:35, and 8:15 out of plan. I didn't trade on the 8:40 and 8:45 (range bound dojis). I came out early on the 9:50 and reversed. The only other 'mistake' was that my order on the 11:15 did not get filled (I placed another one after the first got stopped) and I didn't notice until 11:35.


Tough calls on the range bound afternoon, but I didn't fair too badly. If the 11:15 would have been filled I would have been very close to the sim results. I am sure some more definition would be helpful (re. what to do with a range), but discretionary trading will never be perfect, a guy just has to do the best he can.

Day 1 down.

Trade well.