This New Trader is Improving

I should facetiously title this post “The glamorous life of a managing partner”. Yesterday Leo, who runs our active trader college program, and I drove eight hours back and forth to Bentley U, arrived back home at 1am, woke up at 5AM to scoot to the airport for a 6:50AM flight to Vegas. We had a blast at Bentley and worth every driving mile. Some really wonderful conversations with young students with very bright futures. I am presenting at the Las Vegas Trader Expo on Friday. Which reminds me if you are in the area please come by and say hi. On the flight out, I worked on my power point presentation, and tried to make a dent in the two days of behind emails. Drinking lots of water to stay hydrated as I recognize travel, with a lack of proper sleep like this, can bring a nasty flu.

A fun part of the flight out West at 35k feet on my gogo internet connection is going over some trainees’ reviews from yesterday’s trading session. TO sent me his work, which fits nicely into my thesis I shared at Bentley U last night. TO showed up for training with a nice background of college trading. Peter stays till 7pm on most nights and does an all-star job of reviewing his work and focusing on getting better everyday. He is a catalog perfect model for the aspiring young trader.

From TO’s review:

Positives:
Put myself in a position to win at the Open by focusing on a big picture play that made sense to me — in this case, PEIX. I’ve come to realize that it no longer makes sense to favor a stock just because it has earnings… if the gap is too small, if the pre-market volume is too light, if there’s a conference call, if i cant make sense of the long-term story, or if the uptick rule just makes it too difficult to trade… it’s these details that make a CECO or a QCOM or an APOL… can’t count how many times I’ve invested time in an ordinary gap down, hoping there will be an unusual hold to give me a 100-1 r/r trade and it never comes and I just churn…
My stock selection continues to be pretty good for those accumulation-breakout setups. VIT was a good one… execution still isn’t perfect, but if there was one long into the Close that worked in the market downtick, it was this one.
I was patient and mostly traded the stocks I prepared for from the morning.

Traders often talk about their intuition. Well you do not build intuition without screen time and purposeful practice. TO is now able to find the better gap set ups because he has spent numerous opens fully prepared and carefully considering the best gaps to play. He could have walked in on most trading sessions in his first 8 months, blindly listed to our AM meeting, not internalized a best set up on the open for him, and now be sitting without the skill to find the best stocks for him.

But now that is not the case. It was his pre-open thought preparation. It was his after the close review of the stocks he chose. It was quietly thinking about his trading. Hours of journaling. It was talking to some other traders and getting their feedback. And now he has improved.

My days are packed with learning meetings in Vegas. Should be a fun two days!

Bella
One Good Trade