The Road to Consistency

[trader99]

Ahh. Yes. But there is no need for madness, because you caught a good chunk of it. Drink some tequila, and celebrate by snorting the worm right up into your brain through the septum. Twice.

I don't drink. I mean i drink socially and very little. When I recover all of my losses then I will celebrate.

 

[trader99]

11/22/2019:
Non-Taxable Acct: IB IRA
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Realized gain:$403 (trading NQ again after a very long hiatus)
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11/22/2019:
Taxable Acct: Trade Zero
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Realized gain: - $264.94
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Captured 17 NQ points! NQ fell a total of 60 pts from my entry. Then afterwards, just scalped a little bit because I have a lot of non-trading activities to attend to today. Of course, I didn't expect to capture the full MFE. I'm only trading 1 lot to get my feet wet again.

In Tradezero, I wasn't very aggressive. Still holding onto 4K shares of a stock that had unrealized gains yesterday but today has unrealized losses. As a daytrader, I should have just gotten out everything at the highs yesterday. I did get out all of my call options. I'm so glad I did! Else it would have lost half of its value. But for the stock I got out of most of the shares and still holding some for the next few weeks as a swing trading experiment.

Now I realized I should have gotten out all of my shares as well. I knew it was a pullback today from the charts but I didn't know how bad of a pullback. I could have gotten short some shares.

Have you guys ever done something like this? Long a stock in one account for long term hold and short the same stock in another account to smooth out the short-term fluctuations? I've been thinking about doing that...

 

[trader99]

11/25/2019:
Non-Taxable Acct: IB IRA
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Realized gain:$131
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11/25/2019:
Taxable Acct: Trade Zero
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Realized gain: $76.25
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Busy with non-trading activities today. So I didn't really focused on trading. Just in the green on a couple of trades. Stopping for the day so I can do my work, etc.

 

[trader99]

11/26/2019:
Non-Taxable Acct: IB IRA
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Realized gain:$555
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11/26/2019:
Taxable Acct: Trade Zero
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Realized gain: $1417.85
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11/26/2019:
Taxable Acct: Robinhood
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Realized gain: $3500
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Robinhood by far is the most volatile. Most of those gains were MTM gains from being down. So it's not real real gains in my eyes. But I'll take it.

The other 2 accounts are real realized gains. Getting better every day!

 

[ironchef]

Big profits came from swing trading these options.

One of the posters that actually helped me a lot was @MrScalper who no longer posts here. I don't know how good a trader he was but I learned this from him:

1. Look at charts, not indicators.

2. Trading is like hunting, you follow your prey.

To that I add another analogy: There are two types of traders, those that hunt and those that farm. You have to decide which one you want to be.

Happy holiday to you and your family.

 

[trader99]

11/27/2019:
Taxable Acct: Trade Zero
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Realized gain: $69.58
Unrealized gain: $520
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11/27/2019:
Taxable Acct: Robinhood
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Realized gain: $1623.56
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Trading EVH. Scary mofo ride! It eventually went where I thought it would go. On the options side, I got out at good prices. On the stocks, ironically, got out too soon. Had I found out about EVH news earlier, I could have gotten in those calls supercheap and I would have made $25K. oh well. next time. Kaizen. Constant and neverending improvement.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

 

[jl1575]

Glad to see you banking good coins day after day!

Now I figure out that you like to play those highly volatile low price stocks with a large size. The other day you mention you played with a size of 5K or more, I tried to figure out what kinds of stocks you were playing, then you mentioned ACB and now EVH, and that makes sense now.

The stocks I trade are all ranging between $100 to $200 or higher, so trading with a size of 5K would need half to one million buying power! But it is more relax to play those major components of SP500, as their movements are not so erratic. So in the morning I spend about half hour enter the trades (around 9:45 to 10:15), either stock or option, 10 to 20 of them, size from 100 to 300, and then around 2:00 to 3:00pm I close most of them and done for the day. Pretty much stress free, as I play with the probability and mostly winners are far outnumber losers; sometime I trade those ES and the like if there is a good movement.

 

[trader99]

Glad to see you banking good coins day after day!

Now I figure out that you like to play those highly volatile low price stocks with a large size. The other day you mention you played with a size of 5K or more, I tried to figure out what kinds of stocks you were playing, then you mentioned ACB and now EVH, and that makes sense now.

The stocks I trade are all ranging between $100 to $200 or higher, so trading with a size of 5K would need half to one million buying power! But it is more relax to play those major components of SP500, as their movements are not so erratic. So in the morning I spend about half hour enter the trades (around 9:45 to 10:15), either stock or option, 10 to 20 of them, size from 100 to 300, and then around 2:00 to 3:00pm I close most of them and done for the day. Pretty much stress free, as I play with the probability and mostly winners are far outnumber losers; sometime I trade those ES and the like if there is a good movement.

Yeah. I like those small priced high volatility stocks. It's always a scary ride when I trade them.

The most size I have even traded in one stock was 60K shares. You read that correctly. 60K.

I've shorted PCG on 30K shares before but it was scary as heck.

I like size. But I like your strategy of trading lower volatility names. In your case, you spread them out in a portfolio of 10-20 stocks each 100-300 shares. What do you use to monitor so many stocks in a portfolio at once?

I know a lot of fund managers use that approach and the old quant fund I worked at the beginning of my career(many many many years ago) does that over hundreds to thousands of names. Closet indexer. hehe. jk.

With that approach, you can't really use TA and chart reading. You just enter with your signal and have stops in place. Is that how you play that?

So, are you a systematic trader? It's ironic that I used to work as a quant but nowadays in my daytrading I'm a 100% technical chart reader and manual at that.

 

[ironchef]

By George he's got it, by George he's got it!

 

[ironchef]

Glad to see you banking good coins day after day!

Now I figure out that you like to play those highly volatile low price stocks with a large size. The other day you mention you played with a size of 5K or more, I tried to figure out what kinds of stocks you were playing, then you mentioned ACB and now EVH, and that makes sense now.

The stocks I trade are all ranging between $100 to $200 or higher, so trading with a size of 5K would need half to one million buying power! But it is more relax to play those major components of SP500, as their movements are not so erratic. So in the morning I spend about half hour enter the trades (around 9:45 to 10:15), either stock or option, 10 to 20 of them, size from 100 to 300, and then around 2:00 to 3:00pm I close most of them and done for the day. Pretty much stress free, as I play with the probability and mostly winners are far outnumber losers; sometime I trade those ES and the like if there is a good movement.

Great approach.