Summary:
Finished the day at -$121 (paper trading 200 shares of TNA):
But hey - I was consistent. (At least as far as entries were concerned, I didn't do such a great job with the trailing stops, which I forgot to adjust once. See the charts below.)
It's just nice when consistency and profit go hand in hand.
I had a difficult time interpreting direction today. One bad thing about this strategy is that it insists that I pick a direction and commit to it. For example, there was a signal to go short on the 2:30, but I was already holding a position to go long, so I waited until I got stopped. By the time the position was stopped, the short side stop was beyond my tolerance.
One way to look at the day's trades: I did not interpret direction correctly. I should have seen that the momo was to the sellers and only looked for opportunities to short. I need to learn to read the charts better.
But I think that would be doing myself a dis-service - and be deadset against what Douglas promotes and Scott endorses: anything can happen at any time. I played high probability trades that didn't work out. Well - ok, I played relatively high probability trades that didn't work out - both the market and TNA had too much indecision to make them ideal trades.
Again - and I need to remind myself - the goal here is to convince myself that anything can happen. EOD profit is irrelevant for now.
Along those lines, I experienced a first over the weekend. I was listening to Scott's affirmations (specifically, Abundance, Acceptance, and Application, the link doesn't seem to be on that page any longer) and for the first time I had a definite vision to accompany 'think about and imagine what it would be like to be the best you, you could be.' Every time in the past this phrase brought to mind some kind of fuzzy, profitable, savvy trader; but over the weekend the first thing that came to mind was an image of me being consistent: consistently applying my plan, without hesitation, fear, hope, or doubt. A hint of progress?
Then of course I start to actually hear the 'planning out your work, ...working out your plan' theme throughout the affirmation. It has always been there, but I have not consciously acknowledged it. Funny how life works; you think you hear, only to find out later you didn't have a clue. Same information, different take. A perfect example of Douglas' belief system theory. I don't think there are any short cuts to this, we just don't know what we don't know before we know it. Heh. Seems we need to walk thru each of the 'aha' moments on our own time and personal schedules.
One thing I considered today is moving onto and considering other stocks. I chose to limit myself to one stock for awhile to keep things simple and to help focus attention on the plan. I picked TNA because it has plenty of action and has proven especially troublesome for me in the past (if I could become good at trading TNA, everything else would be cake). This has been a great exercise, but I think I am ready to move onto the 'traditional' approach using the new hi/lo screener, looking for stocks with clear intraday momo. If I begin to sense that I am regressing then I will go back to the single stock approach.
Trade well.
Oh yeah - and.. before I am 40:
http://www.warriordash.com/
Details:
that is what i hate, when you are long, see a candle that says "get short" but since you are long you have to wait to get stopped out.
ReplyDeleteit looks like you had a great day though. solid entries, just got no trend to help you exit the morning trade.
i was reading "trading from the gut". much better than what i thought while i was in the bookstore. he seems to combine elements of scott (anything can happen), phantom of the pit (you are wrong until proven right), and douglas (receny bias and cognitive biases). very interested read. i keep wanting to highlight. got to remember to bring the highlighter to the pool with me, man what a life.
my buddy in new york does those crazy running/biking events. he always calls me and asks "hey, you want to go bike the grand canyon for 9 days, or hey, you want to come do this warrior run with me". i say "listen dude, if you want me to meet you on vacation, make sure it's on a mountain where i can ski, an ocean where i can surf, a casino in vegas, or a tropical island with lots of pina colada's. knock it off with these adventure trips. i don't want to sweat on my vacation!"
its possible you could have found a nice trending stock today and stuck with it. what has been working for me lately, is to find top 20-50 stocks that are up/down the most that morning. these are the ones that will either continuing going up/down, stay consolidated all day, and sometimes go opposite the morning move. but at least they are moving in one direction or the other.