The Day Trading Experiment: End of Day Journal (12-3-2010)

Friday, December 3, 2010

End of Day Journal (12-3-2010)

Summary:

Live trading on 50 shares today:

Traded until lunch-ish and took off the rest of the day to pursue my studies. It felt incredibly good to keep this schedule.

That is, until I started reading Scott's blog entires... Ha! He captured some incredible moves today. Makes my little $1.80-ish look rather pathetic. I had to remind myself that he is a master and I am still the padawan - give me 10 years and I will be so pro... Until then I have to do the best I can.

Interesting day... I experienced some 'new' thoughts/experiences today. For one, I had some great entries on CMG - but they were all long. Heh. The first entry climbed +$1.50/share and I kept sitting on it. As it stalled, I started thinking - where are the buyers? But I decided to show some patience. I ended up closing at ~ +$0.50/share. The second entry climbed to +$0.40 before stalling, and again, I thought where are the buyers? I got stopped out. The third entry - long again, climbed to +$0.80 and fizzled. Once again, I thought, where are the buyers? This time however, I acted on the thought immediately and closed on limit for about +$0.30. The price went straight down from there. After that exit I looked at the chart and thought - CMG has been racing down all morning - why am I playing the long? I went short on the next opportunity and closed for ~+$1.80 on nearly a perfect exit. As it turns out, I was reading the price action incredibly well. I finally trusted that 'sense' (or what I was seeing) and caught some action. Trusting my reaction earlier on the exit side would of proven very profitable.

What is happening is always right there in front of me; I don't think it is too quick to say that my chart analysis has already proven beneficial - in some ways, I think it is getting me back to what I 'saw' (without description) on some of my crazy good days sim trading on range charts. I think the missed $4 NFLX move this week really clouded my judgment. After I missed it, I convinced myself that I needed to have 'patience' and let the trend go. Patience is bad. Perhaps I should qualify that - patience is bad when it becomes the priority over price action. When I make the goal patience, I start to ignore what I see all in the good name of having patience. This week would of been so much more profitable if I would of made price action the priority rather than some 'virtuous' character quality. Patience is bad, very bad.

There. All I my defects in character are now justified - I want to be a good trader... Ha!

The Cf trade was a fiasco of sorts. I was watching the ~10:35 entry but passed on it. It proceeded to climb ~$1.50 from my potential entry. When it signaled again I entered and saw $0.40; but this was just before I had reached the 'Maybe I should trust myself' status and let it come back to the stop. Anyhoo - I always get a little bit of direction; I need to pay attention to when it simply stops moving and bail with no regrets.

FIRST POSITIVE WEEK! Since who knows when! All ~$40 of it! LOL! (Commissions are way out of proportion to profits with such a low lot size - typical commissions are $0.90 on 50 shares; I have had commisisons as low as $1 on 1000 shares.) But what a confidence boost. Trading live has proven a little more difficult than I anticipated - but wow - I am in a much better place than prior forays. Coming up on the 1st year anniversary. Will be interesting to see how this month plays out.

And on an end note, I noticed while doing the EOD analysis that I had a tendency to brush stuff aside and quickly see what I was expecting to see... rather than approaching the charts with an unbiased and critical eye. Towards the end of the analysis I attempted to be vigilant and remedy this, but perhaps with mixed results. I will try to make it a point to approach each chart totally open to what is happening rather than what I 'want' to see happen; e.g., patterns I have seen over the last two days 'showing up' again - I found myself perhaps a little too ready to see them - that is a trap.

Trust myself. Keep analyzing charts. Trust myself. And don't mistake 'character attributes' for some mis-cast virtuosity... that is just my co-dependency coming out ^^.

TRADE WELL.

And have a great weekend. Charts... here I come.