I shorted ROH in the Premarket.  Chop!  I shorted CAT on the Open.  Chop!  And then CAT got hard.  I made some and I lost some.  And as I like to kid our desk, then people started bothering me.

Roy generally bothers me first about something I need to do for him.  Roy runs SMB Training.  So if you are interested in learning some more about our training program that we created for our proprietary trading desk, which we recently offered to the public, then he is your guy.  Then Charlie starts bothering me.  Charlie is so polite.  “Mike are you trading?” he always asks first.  But still he is bothering me none the less.  If you write to us about an interview then Charlie is the one who responds generally.  I wish I could be as polite as Charlie.  And if Charlie or Roy aren’t bothering me then Rosemary will about the next class I need to teach.  OK so I am absolutely just kidding about the above.  I enjoy working on stuff other than my own personal trading.  This is the best part about running a firm.

But today I made 80 percent of my money before 9:45.  I saw a few excellent risk/reward opportunities and I pounced.  And the trades worked.  I might live to be a hundred if everyday was like this.  Talk about a lack of stress.  But I picked my spots.  And I kept my profits.  I did not overtrade midday.  I was in the right stocks.  I did not force trades into the Close.  I lowered my tier size while trading AFL into the Close.  I just didn’t see the great trading opportunity with AFL into the Close.  I kept my losses small when CAT started not to work.

I had all of these opportunities to give back my profits during the day.  And I didn’t.  This is a game.  Golfers talk about scoring.  Phil might say after a round, “I didn’t hit the ball that well, but I scored well.”  This is the same with trading.  We all receive a score.  At the end of the day on our trading screens there is our score, our P&L.  And you need to learn a whole bunch of tricks, such as the above, to ensure that you do score well. 

Today before the Open I exchanged a few emails with one of our favorite traders.  He loves the markets.  He works very hard.  He was very successful in a cut throat field before trading with us.  And he sent me his goals for this week.  I suggested that he start to focus on putting up a number every day this week.   Spend all of your mental energy focusing on all the things that you must do to create this result.  I wanted him to work on his scoring.   

Our desk talks so much about developing your trading skills.  We work very hard watching tape of our trading.  But you also must learn how to score.

Good luck with your trading!