It beats digging ditches..hopefully

B

BeatsDD

As far as trading goes, my background has been primarily swinging lower priced stocks. After building up some capital over the past few years and working around the PDT rule, I've decided to take the plunge and try my hand at daytrading.

I figure it would be a good time to start a journal seeing that it might be of some help to somebody in the future doing the same as I am.

And here we are..I've spent the past few days sitting in on a group of traders while trying to learn the new platform. Maybe some of their luck will rub off on me as I think I'll be trading in the AM...
 
You rarely lose money digging ditches, unlike in day trading. In addition, hope is a pretty schitty edge. So you might want to reconsider the ditch digging.

Do you have a trading plan? What's your max loss for the day, week, and month before you hang it up for the rest of the period? Have you shown profitability for at least one month in simulated trading?

The market is a flame that draws a trader in like a moth to a candle. The fire sears the undisciplined and cruelly burns the impulsive. If you have a need to be right, the fire inflicts despair until you give it up or give up. Whether the fire purifies you or destroys you, depends upon who you think you are or were. If you think about it, you are the fire.
 
Very true about losing money digging ditches..if I lose it, it falls on solid ground to be picked up again.

My plan is to focus on recovery plays as that's what I look for on my swings, but with the shorter time frames I'll be able to play breakout opportunities as well. My max loss is set at 500, but I really don't want to lose more than 300 which is fairly tight on the share count I'm doing..maybe I should think about changing, but it's what I've been doing on a different platform's demo for the past few months and it's been working out.

Today there was really only one stock of interest that had potential for recovery, MON..that was pretty much the only stock that didn't gap up 2 points. After being in that trade for the better part of the day, it paid off. I traded RIG pretty much right off the open a few times. My big mistake was trying to play the downside of the market (i know the market gapped up big). I pretty much longed VXX and longed UPRO as a hedge, but felt like I hadn't bought enough shares of the hedge so I tried to fix it and probably made it worse. I actually did this twice and as you can see was wrong on both. I'm a little disappointed in the ATPG trade, I left a lot of money on the table there, but I'll take what I can get.

All in all, I'm definitely happy how the day turned out and hope that all of the demo time pays off. Today felt like a grind though, paying way too much attention to the charts and numbers and making sure things were working right.
 

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Pretty good score. That's way more than a ditch digger makes in a day. Don't let it go to your head. In trading, euphoria is worse than greed.
 
look pal

don't want to be mean to you

but if you can't define exactly what edge you have and why it works

FORGET IT until you get it.
 
Quote from Retief:

Pretty good score. That's way more than a ditch digger makes in a day. Don't let it go to your head. In trading, euphoria is worse than greed.
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Thanks man. I definitely won't. May 6th is a good example of how quickly things could turn.
 
Quote from NumLock:

look pal

don't want to be mean to you

but if you can't define exactly what edge you have and why it works

FORGET IT until you get it.
More...

I have the four edges of my desk, I do know that... :D

Every selloff most always has to have a bounce, otherwise it would go straight to zero, today oils sold off quite a bit and bounced. So my edge is picking them out. For the most part the principles from reading a chart for a swing apply to the quicker timeframes, just everything happens much faster.
 
Been a long weekend, hopefully everybody had a good one! Trading Friday went okay. From what I remember, the market didn't do too much in the morning and I got caught trying to force BCSI to work, but all in all a positive day.
 

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Yesterday seemed a little bit more easy I guess since I sat in with the group again, but yeah. In the morning we traded RIG and APC for a decent move, but I did end up taking a loss on APC (hoping it'll move today). DB was the winner for the day..looking back on it, I cut it way short. All in all, very satisfied as to the way things are starting out.
 

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