December Trading Journals

You have made a case for a bearish posture. If you are right it may take months or years for the bearish scenario to unfold. Most people here seem to trade on the minutes to few days time scales and for them the shorter term trends are much more significant (I would think) than the type of longer term strategic analysis you have outlined.

My question is what timescales do you trade to take advantage of your strategic analysis? If you trade short-term to some extent, how does your analysis affect your shorter-term trading? Presumably you can't fight the tape in spite of your bearish bias.

I will not be avoiding the market for the next few days, because I trade individual stocks and you never know which days will provide the opportunities in them. In fact the week between Christmas and New Year was my best one last year. Interestingly I had a different take on this period. You seem to think the small traders are absent. I assumed that week was easy for me last year because of the relative absence of the pros and the thought that we had a whole bunch of small part-time traders punching their keyboards on their Chrismas break.
 
I hold my positions an avg. of 2-5 days. HOWEVER, I am constantly trading in and out of the position during that time frame.

In other words, I may begin an operation involving a particular stock, and that operation may run 3 weeks, but I will trade in and out of the stock on a daily basis. If my entire line in that stock is 10,000 shares, I will not go home with more than 10% of the position overnight. I will re-engage the next day, etc...

Like I said, regardless of your time horizon, it is vital to be aware of the diff't dominant trends. Even if you're a scalper, would you be trading with a long bias if the trend is down?
 
Well, I am not a scalper, but presumably I would if the short term trend is up. I am afraid I still do not understand how your long term picture affects your short term tradin.
 
I know some very good scalpers that would classify 90 minutes as a long-term trade.

To me, it takes at least 90 minutes to put on the full position.

My short term trades are approx. 2 days. My long term would be considered 3 months. However, I will ride a trend for as little or as long as it wants to go. I always unload 90% of my equity into cash for overnight purposes.

Pej
 
My trades last anywhere from a few seconds to a few weeks... a good example of a very short-term trade are abberations within Level 2 resulting from trader fear.. by being the counterparty to a fearful trader, there are numerous situations in which you can immediately lock in a decent sized spread... such a trade lasts a few seconds.

A longer term trade for me lasts a few weeks e.g. ENE (in this particular example, I swung together a few mini-swing-trades).
 
Yet another light day for me but the market was full of opportunities. 6800 shares each way on 6 of 9 shooting, +1048 before commissions, +892 after.

With this win I am $900 away from my first five digit month since March, three games left, hope I don't miss a beat.

Pre-Market: Some positive comments in RLX

9:30: Took TXN on SOX strength and unfortunately had too tight of a stop and got out flat. Got CAL on a XAL bounce for 50 cents. Home Builders have been strong lately and I tried SPF and out flat, but did score 20 cents on DHI.

10:00: Took COF for a point on BKX move, unfortunately my big positions in PPG and CCU didn't work out as I lost 10 cents on each which prevented me from hitting a four digit day. Took TRW/GSK and out for flat. Volume faded and my brain slowed down after I took some pills, didn't trade in the afternoon.

I have completed a 31 pages training manual for new traders, and I am surprised to see that it does help my own trading. I can see why Tony said writing and teaching helped him, because it simply enforces your own discipline. A lot of times over the past week or so I would see a trade and say "I said not to take this kind of trades in my manual", and just back away. It really is helpful to your own trading, if you teach others every now and then.
 
Some nice sector trading there Hitman... in particular, well done on the COF trade, where you nailed a stick, so to speak! COF had a run of sheer beauty, pity I didn't do it :( ... a few thousand on COF would have made my day.
 
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