Just in case Zoomie didn’t start outperforming me today, I decided to erase all my gains for the week. I am such a humanitarian. If only I could eat humanitarian awards, and burn their packaging to keep my apartment warm… :-) Okay, that was over-dramatic…
Anyway, since we had several waves of big negative $TICK’s, and several stocks hovering around their lows, I found 6 trades I wanted to make. I made 4 of them, and managed to take small losses on each. All 6 would have broken even at best, the way I would have managed the trades. Wherever the stocks were that knew how to break out of their opening range, I wasn’t watching them today!
To top it off, the first trade I made today was by accident! I sent the order when I only meant to fill it out. Still, it wasn’t a terrible entry, and I thought I had a good chance of making a profit. Wrong! So, my first two trades of the day (1 intentional, 1 unintentional) were on Occidental Petroleum Corporation (NYSE: OXY):
(all these are going to be 10-min charts, by the way)
Here’s two false starts from American Airlines (NYSE: AMR):
NYSE not treating me well.. how ’bout nasdaq? BAIDU (Nasdaq: BIDU):
or maybe Broadcom (Nasdaq: BRCM)?
fine… how about nVidia (Nasdaq: NVDA)?
To be fair, NVDA acted better than anything else I’ve shown so far, but it still moved back through the entry after the trade had been open 70 minutes… not exactly what you want to see…
Well, I’ve tried oil, airlines, tech, chinese tech… how bout some gold trust (NYSE: GLD)?
Summary
You won’t find me saying any day is bad. I have an amazing life even when I’m bleeding cash. But today was certainly not profitable. It’s not as bad as I might have made it sound, though… I liked the trades I made… and I haven’t totalled it up yet, but I lost a little over 1R across 4 losing trades, which isn’t bad at all. Just one good trade will cancel out all of these.
[EDIT: okay, StockTickr says it totals to 1.07R I lost today. Not a big deal... just a lot of trades with no profit to show for it...]
| Stocks Mentioned In This Article | |
|---|---|
| Stock | Links |
| OXY |  |  |  |
| AMR | | | |
| BIDU | | | |
| BRCM | | | |
| NVDA | | | |
| GLD | | | |
January 5th, 2007 at 1:36 pm
Richard,
I am slightly dyslexic, and have done a couple speed trades with the tickers transposed, so I know what it’s like to make a mistake like your first trade.
Live and learn, and in my case, type slower. LOL!
January 5th, 2007 at 1:47 pm
it doesn’t happen to me that often… in this case it’s a good thing I noticed the order getting filled, or I could have lost a lot more money. I don’t keep a window of my open positions up, so that I won’t obsess about the $ P/L.
January 6th, 2007 at 5:25 pm
Seeing how it is the weekend, I wanted to ask you an OT Q…
How do you feel about catnip?
January 6th, 2007 at 10:43 pm
Catnip? I’m for it! I’m also fond of catnaps. I’m generally against catcalls and cataracts, and RightSaidFred has forever tarnished my impression of catwalks. I will eat catfish but it’s not my favorite. Catgut is very useful, but confusing since it’s made from sheep… so I give it mixed reviews.
January 7th, 2007 at 1:47 pm
LOL!
March 3rd, 2007 at 11:28 am
[...] well as my trade count, were much higher this month, compared to just 6 trades in December. I had one losing day this month, where I was 0 for 4. Until I went and re-read that day’s entry, I didn’t even remember [...]