Today our best morning idea was to play $VLO off the $18 secondary offering price. From the daily chart you can see that the stock had just came off about 20% in the last 2 days and figured the underwriters of the offering would help support the beaten up stock down at this level. The play was to buy at … Read More
Question From a New Trader
I received the following inquiry from one of our talented new traders while going over our mentoring spreadsheet. “I took a pretty big rip late in the day in this stock and wanted to know if I got out of it the right way; there was a battle between 48.12 and 48.15 and I paid for 100 at 48.16 when … Read More
SPYs Holds Below 90
Last night I was hoping we would gap down near 90, get tested and hold so that we could have a strong day. I did get the gap I wanted and was trading lightly in premarket with the idea of buying into the gap. Unfortunately, the retail sales data at 8:30am was worse than expected and the SPYs traded cleanly … Read More
Learning From Other Traders
New traders at SMB can learn from themselves, their mentor and their peers. Here at SMB we have many guys that are obsessed with trading. Every chance we get, we talk about different plays, how we traded them, how much size we thought was reasonable, and how we could have traded that play differently. I want to highlight the importance … Read More
Silly Mentality
For the past week or so we have been on the look out for the turn on the market. We are currently a bit overbought and it seems that the turn could have started today. We had a very nice steady sell off and based on the price action we could tank tomorrow. If the SPYs start to hold above … Read More
Quick Nighttime Thoughts – The Turn On The Way?
The market has been offering a few clues about a possible pause in the rally run we have had over the past 4-5 weeks. The financials have been a leading sector and I wanted to point out a few things. As I discussed in our AM Meeting, there seemed to be a blow off top in the XLF and IYF … Read More
Percentage Returns for Day Traders?
A couple of days ago I received an email from a blog reader inquiring about my performance for this year. And often times we are asked during interviews what kind of returns we generate. Almost every day I see on Facebook and some blogs people posting their percentage returns for a particular stock. Individual investors among others judge their performance … Read More
Note of Caution On Trading Systems
On my way to San Diego I began reading The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I am still working on the book but I wanted to share some thoughts that can relate to trading. The author discusses how it is in our nature to use past instances that corroborate a hypothesis and use that as evidence to prove … Read More