Today’s Trades in RDC and DPTR

What can I say about today? I think I traded like I planned to. Had some bad luck.

A lot of my stocks hit their trigger points shortly after 10 or 10:30. Too many to keep up with, in fact! It was an unfortunate situation where:

• They were just running up without setting up first
• Most of them were stalling out, or reversing

So… to avoid being left out completely, I scalped Rowan Companies, Inc. (NYSE: RDC) for a little money, but not much. Then it ran up in a pretty orderly fashion the entire rest of the day. Damn! Not bothering with the chart on this 1-minute scalp.

A little later, I saw a pretty good-looking setup in Delta Petroleum Corp. (Nasdaq: DPTR). A kind of ascending triangle with increasing volume, right under 27. It had been building for an hour and a half, almost. Looked good on the 5 and 10 minute charts. Even looked decent on 30 minute charts, though the wicks were a little long. So, I bought the break through 27. I got filled all the way up to 27.07, but still had a good basis of about 27.03.

Then, the tick went pretty negative. Good grief, this was like a flashback from my week of endless pain a few weeks back. Then, the stock fell below my entry to 26.95 or so, and was hovering there. At this point, I had two thoughts:

1. If this stock can’t hold above 26.90, I’m getting out.
2. It’s holding up pretty well compared to the way the markets are acting at the moment.

Now, when I thought #2, I wasn’t rationalizing, or imagining anything. The markets were very negative, and for about 10 minutes, DPTR was holding up flat. But, it seems like, whenever I have that thought, the stock never goes back up. I should make a note that whenever I think that, it’s just time to bail. Plain and simple. (if you read through some of my losing trades over the last month or so, you’ll see me saying “it was holding up well compared to the TICKS,” etc. a bunch).

Anyway, 26.92. come on… 26.91… 26.94… go baby, go! then, the bid popped from 26.91 to 26.81. Huh? I hate sudden 15 cent spreads on a $26 stock. That’s a nightmare. Knowing I was going to get filled at the bid regardless, I paused a moment to see if the ask would drop, or if the bid would rise. (Keep in mind, my 1R stop was at 26.75, so I had some room). The bid did go up, to 26.84, at which point I issued my sell order to get out. I was filled all the way down to 26.71. Good grief! But, oddly enough, my average exit price was right at my 26.75 stop (within a fraction of a penny, anyway). So, not a fun trade.

I watched NVDA run through my target and reverse. I watched SIRF try a few times to break out. And the whole time, RDC just kept waltzing up without me.

So, the other thing that I think about after having a few days like this recently: it seems like the bad setups that I skip are working better than the good ones that I take. If that makes sense. The cleanest setups I’m finding seem to all pop and reverse on me. Meanwhile, the stocks that rage through my buy number from 50 cents below it seem to keep on going. Maybe the “good” setups are too obvious to be good. I blame the computers. :-)

The Evolution of Comment Spam
For those of you without a blog, I thought you might like a glimpse of what I see about 60 of every damn day. Comment spam is usually pretty easy to spot. Surprisingly often, they are just a series of links to porn sites:

{link} {link} {link}

… Once I’ve determined it’s not a genuine semi-pornographic comment from tale of the tape, I just delete it. :-)

When they are not just a list of links, they frequently take the form:

Nice site look this: {link}

… uh, not very sneaky. Sometimes they are a bit more elaborate:

Hi, I really like your site. Where is the FAQ? I thought you might like to see {link} {link} {link}

or:

I think something’s wrong with your site today. I can’t seem to find what I was reading yesterday. Look this: {link} {link} {link}

(I love how, after all that good grammar, at the punchline they often revert to “look this”.)

Then, the other day, I got a very very sneaky one, that I had to stare at for a long time. It had no links in it, other than the commenter’s url. But, the text was pretty vague, and not really related to the article. I went to the url, and it was a page full of nothing but ads. I wish I had kept it to present here, but it was perfectly good English, and not very spammy. Yes, I can critique the english proficiency of others and use spammy in the same sentence. :-)

I hope that last trend does not continue. It makes it a lot more time consuming to tell what is spam, and what isn’t. And, I am trying to avoid using those anti-spam “type in these fuzzy warped letters” systems. We’ll just have to see.

Stocks Mentioned In This Article
Stock	Links
RDC	| |
DPTR	| |