Pile-O-Trades

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

I took some swing trades from yesterday to today, as well as a day trade today. Here they are:

1. Cosi, Inc. (NASDAQ: COSI)

I’ve been watching some of Muddy’s 10/60 EMA Green volume spike plays, and so I tried this one. The way it’s supposed to work (I think) is that there is a green for the day high-volume surge, where the 10 ema crosses the 60 ema on a 5 min chart. Go over to Muddy’s for the details, and visit his chatroom for candidates in real time.

For this trade, my entry was bad–I bought it late, at the close Tuesday–to see what would happen at the open. My stop was at the red line, $5.83. It didn’t really go anywhere for most of the day today, and I was doing something else during the surge after the Fed announced. I decided to sell at the close today for a 0.1R Loss. Only 13 shares, and the PnL was only -$1.04. I just took this trade for something to do, as I’m still not nailed down to a swing trade system.

2. CytRx Corporation (NASDAQ: CYTR)

This was a much better 10/60 Muddy play. I bought 40 shares early yesterday, as it made a new high at $2.65, and I placed my initial stop at $2.40. The exit is when the 10/60 crosses back down again, or you get stopped out. I held through the day, raising my stop to breakeven as the trade moved in my favor. Today, when the 10/60 crossed back under I sold shortly after the cross at $2.92 for a 1.08R gain of $10.80–the position was up almost 11%, but my stop was also just about as far away. I took such a wide stop due to my need to swing trade to avoid breaking the pattern daytrader rules. Still, if I had used a closer stop, I could have loaded up my position more and made more R’s for my same ~$10 at risk.

3. Trader-X Daytrade: The Allstate Corporation (NYSE: ALL)

The trade details are on the chart (short 21 shares). This is another one I took that never made it to the fib extension, and when the price closed above the 5-ema, I put in a limit order to cover at 1R and got it. I was watching layered support and resistance on this tick chart:

The tick chart is what I used to decide whether to cover at market or put in a limit order. The price was drifting down, falling to a support level, rising up to a resistance level, falling back down to a new support level, etc. Looking at the right side of the chart, it broke the $60.20 level at around the same time that it closed above the 5-ema, which is an exit signal. if it had broken the resistance at $60.40, I would have covered at market, but since it didn’t, I covered using the limit order at 1R and got filled, PnL $6.30. I couldn’t risk a full $10 as my buying power was reduced by other trades, so all R’s are not created equal.

During this end of day time, I saw these two WTF situations on Level II:

Two situations where there was big size at prices far removed from the NASD NYSE and other big MM’s, like it was just ignored. I don’t know if it was a glitch in my feed or really there, but if so you could have arbitraged those suckers with a direct access platform. Does anybody see this often? Not really related to my trade, just curious.

Stocks Mentioned In This Article
Stock	Links
COSI	| |
CYTR	| |
ALL	| |

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