oft journal - equities

[ofthomas]

+161.40 +0.5%

happy to have a decent day today; the strategy worked as planned but still had issues ... at a point in time it was up 1% with a few $1 trades, which eventually retraced given I have a time stop, without a profit target or trailing stop... given it has happened now a few times, that occurrence has lead me to implement a $1 target with all the trades... the way I see it, if I buy something and it moves a buck immediately, sell it.. and sell it fast... no sense on wasting time waiting for a time stop to come around..

Trade-Ideas BrokeragePlus has behaved as expected, am very happy with it... and I like being able to quickly implement any changes without having to stop everything and lose track of what I am doing... it is all done with a simple click and nothing else.. I have a list of suggestions I am planning on sending the developer that I am hoping will eventually be implemented... mostly dealing with execution conditions and order routing...

 

[ofthomas]

(155.60) -0.51%

day started well, two initial trades both moving in the money... then $Z=Zillow came in.. WTF... talk about a spread... 32c... needless to say filtering by volume doesnt equate to tight spreads...

I still followed the plan and let things run as they were supposed to... I do have some changes to make though, for as long as I dont have short strats participating I have to focus on, or be mindful of overall market direction... that way I can avoid clear pullbacks that are not really pull backs... I have some additional modeling to do by filtering beta... will see what happens...

on a good note, I rebuilt my server near the exchange in NJ and I am now running the platform and trade-ideas brokerageplus interface within a VM... which has helped a bit with fills, I am back to doing limit orders vs. market orders... that should help with the liquidity fees.

 

[ofthomas]

but I just didn't see much value to posting here given I was practically receiving no feedback from my posts, then again is not like I was documenting my "strategies" ... as such, I decided to write on my journal and just document key failures and focus on correcting them...

I still have a long way to go to correct many of my flaws, but I am on my way and expect to eventually get my challenges addressed and trading my account in a more consistent manner.