Guest Post: Swing Trade: OMTR

Posted on January 16th, 2007
Written by Prospectus
Posted in: N/A (old archives)

This post was contributed by a guest author, and does not necessarily reflect the views of Richard or MovetheMarkets.com

I went long Omniture, Inc. (NASDAQ: OMTR) on the close Thursday 1/11. It was one of Richard’s New High Scan candidates. I bought 10 shares at $14.94, which is a tiny position for me, but it had to be for the distance of my stop (@ $13.28). My stop was probably overly conservative, and I blame my daytrader-trying-to-swing trade mentality. My R was roughly $16. I closed the trade out today because price was bumping into the $16 resistance, and it didn’t look really strong to me, with lower highs and low volume on the intraday chart:

Daily Chart
chart-of-omtr2.gif
Intraday Chart
chart-of-omtr1.gif

Historically, I would have moved my stop up to about $15.70 at around 11:00 am, and waited to see what would happen. This kind of play would usually turn down and stop me out with a very small profit. I decided to take the 0.58R that fate gave me and call it a trade. I guess the next day or two will show if my read was correct. Here’s the tick chart, showing the weakness I was perceiving (I am an eNfP):

chart-of-omtr3.gif

Over the last few years of watching stocks, I’ve found that prices almost never just take off, blasting through resistances and round numbers never to return, nor do they frequently fall down through the floor in a panic and lie stone dead. It seems like they do at first glance, because the few that do are given such notoriety, and newbies like me think that this is the way that prices act in general, day in and day out. So then you buy and wait for the endless rocket up to the moon, and at the first pullback, you think that you were wrong and sell. Of course you should sell if you actually were wrong, and that’s the intent of a real stop. But if I had sold on Friday at $15.20, I would have missed out on the profits today. Choose a timeframe, choose an entry, a stop and a target, and then execute! I didn’t have a target, so I bailed in a period of strength rather than weakness, which is a departure from my past style, but I think a move for the better.

Any comments are welcome!

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