One Good Trading Day

I received this Daily Review yesterday from one of our traders. I highlight in this blog because it represents One Good Trading day. If you get as much as this trader during each trading day you will grow as a trader. If you are not improving as much as this trader each trading then you have some work to get after.

A few things come to mind today. Starting with the open, I completely overtraded KR today. I think the initial short you called out below 22.15 was worth a shot just to see if there would be a quick sell off on the open but I got up caught up tick trading this on both the long and short sides for no gain and waste of energy. I think the error was I had to high of expectations since it spiked so high premarket forgetting the company is a supermarket with an ATR of .34 so why am I wasting so much time chasing hard money. I like to play thick stocks in the first 10 minutes sometimes to avoid slippage but at the same time I need to be wary of getting ripped up a few pennies at a time and writing a ton of tickets when they aren’t moving. Low risk to get low reward is a waste of mental capital. On a positive note, I did pretty well with AOL and for the first time had more than 2,000 shares on in a position with this stock. Even though there were some screw ups I always want to be pushing myself to use more size whenever I can. Finally, end of the day was pretty wild and I was prepared to some extent with FAS but needed to be quicker to react to the momo money as soon as the news first broke.

AOL:

Was too late to play the break below 25.68 initially but first got in for a scalp when there was a .55 seller and caught a little momo below when .50 dropped but got knocked out of rest above. There was so much volume done in this area that I actually they were going to run the stops on the way up and got long for a scalp when white prints at .61 came in. I paid .63s and got knocked out below .61. This wasn’t the greatest trade but I paid for information which then gave me a ton of conviction for a trade2hold short. This was a failed squeeze to me so I got short 1,200 immediately at .56. I think I did the right thing up to this point but when a .52 buyer dropped I got up to 2,400 shares and immediately felt uncomfortable with this much size even though I liked the play. I hit out of a 1,000 into the uptick but still felt a bit uncomfortable. When .50 finally dropped I think my biggest mistake was I was too quick to cover another 600 in the .40s. The final 800 I did a pretty nice job with holding into the .20s and then reloading in front of .30 seller and capturing the move with all of it down to the whole. The heartbreaker in this stock was the reshort. Around .30 was the most important inflection area for me. After midday I waited for AOL to hold lower again. It came down below .20 and I very patiently built into a reshort with a wide stop which I think I started out great with. I basically got up to 600 shares with average price .26 after seeing the top of the pull back become defined at .34. I did not want to be much bigger until the .20 bid dropped and then I thought I could really lay into it. AOL got below .20 and started to hold and on top of that SPYs broke below 133. I wailed on the bids getting up to 2,000 shares and really felt like I had this when .15 bid dropped. I got knocked out of 1,000 at .21 and another flat at .27. I think this was the best way to manage risk at this point. Gave back 1/3 of what I made in what I thought was an excellent setup.

COST:

Stupid (expletive) trade. Wanted to be short something when market broke below 133. COST had been holding a bit lower and broke below a flag but this was an extremely strong stock with volume into the up move. I end up hitting lows and stopped out above.

CTRP:

This was the first thing I found to get long when market had the big uptick. I blasted 1,000 through .08 and covered half in first pop and stopped out of rest. Good to be long something but not the best choice. Huge opportunity cost watching this go up .10 versus FAS going up a point.

FAS:

This was my go to stock with the European news into the close. A little annoyed I hesitated too much not paying the new high after the first pull back on the 1 minute chart. This is the money trade in FAS where u catch amazing momo. I did do a decent job playing one pulling back and taking sales an more importantly stayed away from this when momentum changed to down side.

KR:

As described above this was not worth my attention on the open. Tick traded the hell out of this and all I got was a head ache.

PGR:

Don’t know how I really feel about this trade. Just took this one on a call out hitting .63 and getting knocked out above .67. This checked the top of the range before breaking down but it’s not really a stock that moves that much.

SFD:

Made one bad trade when the price action wasn’t that great on the open. When the opening range broke I got in for a decent short around .37 but should have had an alert set when .50 dropped. I was never really able to get big in this play because my price wasn’t nice but this could have been a nice trade had I hit below .50 initially and then added.