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I found another benefit of Wallstreak today that I didn’t even consider. As I was watching the market, I posted my interpretation of the market, and what I was specifically eyeing on my screen. The moving averages, indicators, or whatever else I use may not be of much importance to many traders. However, giving the play by play helped me immensely. Not only did it help me crystallize my thoughts, but it gave me something to do besides push buttons to buy and sell. For those who trade the ER2, Ugly is there to give his thoughts. I seem to be stuck on Crude, but am trying to open my horizons.

I would encourage everyone to at least give it a try.

Btw, hopefully Richard will be gracious enough to once again provide the link. If Phileo, Prospectus, or Zoomie reads this, send me an email. For some reason, I can’t see the tab bar where I can post a link anymore. Maybe one of the other contributors that don’t use a Mac can help me here.

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

Today was a strange day in the markets, with few gapper opportunities showing up on my trade-ideas scan. Oddly enough, my overnight scans were also on the light side (the PDF book I generate each night only had 15 pages… it’s usually twice that big).

But, one of the stocks on my personal scans was CERN, since it was edging up against 54.00 as a short play. 6 minutes into the open, it fell to 54 with a 2-cent spread, so I shorted it. I felt good about it initially because my biggest problem with playing the open is how wide the spread can get on stocks. I am allergic to losses, so I stay away from big bid/ask spreads.

I got in at my price, 54, and put my stop at 54.02. Especially since it was a short play, I wanted that sucker to fall hard and fast away from the round number. Initially, I got what I wanted. It fell a good 10 cents, anyway, without looking back up. But, two things were all wrong.

• the volume wasn’t pouring in.
• the spread was getting wider, with no trades printing

As I said on my jaiku post, “when in doubt, get out.” So, even though the markets were looking bearish, and even though the trade was going my way, and even though I would have to eat a 7-cent bid-ask spread… I got out at the market for a 12-cent gain at 53.88 (6R… damn scalps sound impressive in R terms!).

The 3-minute chart:

This is seriously about the best exit possible. I could have maybe gotten two more cents, but the ask never got anywhere near 53.81 while I was in the trade. 53.86 was about the best possible covering price.

I considered trying to get a better price via a limit order, but that has never worked for me. Does that ever work for anyone, and the price doesn’t go on to much better prices? I always say getting out via a spread-splitting limit order only works well when you could have made a lot more money than you did. Maybe others have more luck with it. I’ve found that (in this short-covering case, for instance) it just shows my hand, and makes it look like there’s bullish buying activity with someone bidding for thousands of shares. This causes others to bid the stock up above my bid, and at that point I’ve actually encouraged the price to run away from me!

If you look at the rest of the action on CERN, you can see that it went above 54 for quite a while before falling at the end of the day. So, no complaints. It would turn out to be my only trade today. I went out and ran some errands, but after I was back I still didn’t see much I liked. Hopefully tomorrow will be nicer.

Since there’s nothing going on in the markets, I thought I’d go ahead and pull together my April performance numbers. I’ll include April 30th in the May stats next month.

Wow, what a month! New DOW highs… whatever. It was pretty hard for me to find good trading opportunities in April. Seemed harder than March, but then again I think traders always think this month is the hardest month ever. The last time I thought a month was relatively easy was January.

If you look at my StockTickr calendar view, you’ll see that I only found trades on 9 of the 20 days in this trading month. Knowing I had passed on several days, I said earlier that I wanted to find a trade every day this week. I almost made it. I found something every day but wednesday.

I primarily made scalp-like plays, but I got in a dummy trade, a couple triangle plays, and a play on a trendline break. I’d like to have more variety… I spotted a couple box plays (and even had a couple pointed out to me), but for some reason did not play them even though they never lose money, ever! Oddly enough, I spent every morning completely focused on breakout plays, but none of them came about smoothly enough for me to get into them. Still trying to master the opening minutes… I say that’s where the serious money is.

But, I had no losing days, and only one losing trade. That always helps make up for it!

Jaiku

I had declared March the month of Twitter. Now, I don’t even log onto twitter anymore. Funny how fast things change! Now, I’m on jaiku, and so are several others. We’ll see if May sees yet another shift if Wallstreak steals us all away during the trading day. Even if that happens, I think jaiku will remain a big outlet for me, since I love the service and I like the people I’ve met that are developing the site.

Ok, on to the tables:

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

Trade 1: SPY OMNI

Trade 2: DV

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

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

I love this idea! Come check out Wallstreak over at Ugly’s. He even included a tab for futures. To quote TraderGav, “the real man trades Futures, his son trades Forex…”

Btw, it updates automatically. You don’t have to constantly hit refresh!

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

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

F:

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

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

Jamie gave me a suggestion last night that I should focus on stocks that gap on high volume and then over the next few days print an NR7. I modified my Stockfetcher code to look for recent high volume movers that print an NR7: Read the rest of this entry »

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I was watching the wrong stocks today. They had high relative volume, and were setting up to break out. But, the trade rate was slow, and they were acting choppy. If you look closely, you can see that all their big volume was at the open, and they had cooled way off. So, I saw this, but I just kept watching them. I was obviously not thinking clearly!

Even when I added more stocks to my lists, I still kept watching the original set that went nowhere. I should have just taken them off my screens altogether.

Now, that’s not to say my watchlist didn’t perform well, on paper. There were a few breakouts, but they happened in such an unusual fashion that I couldn’t get into them like I would like to. In particular CAKE made me mad. It leaned against its number for a long time, then somehow popped over it in a single 2000 share trade. That seemed exactly like a bull trap, where the ask disappears and then comes back on strong. But, buyers stepped in and ran it up, instead. Frustrating!

Then at the end of the day I had a Brilliant Idea(TM), which would have made for an impulse trade. But, it didn’t pan out, either. I thought, even if the Fed news sounds good, it probably wouldn’t be able to push the markets even higher. You know, when a stock is overextended, they look for any excuse to sell it some, even if it’s good news. Any event would do. So, I looked for a knee-jerk push up in the QID (double-stuffed inverse QQQQ). But, it didn’t happen, so I went to sleep.

I seem to do best in flat markets. Big up days have never been my paydays.

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Two trades today. Traded them both poorly. If you would like to see how I shoulda traded TFSM, go to Wall Street Warrior’s site.
Trade 1: FO

Trade 2: TFSM

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

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

I’ve been working on a swing trade system that buys breakouts of NR7 candlesticks on a daily chart. The entry would be a break of the high plus a tick or two, and the stop a bit below the low of the NR7 candle. Jamie has been providing his trading expertise, and I have provided some mathe-magic. I use the fabulous stock scanner Stockfetcher to find the candidates. It’s easy to use and very easy to program it to search for what you want. The 2.0 version has a great interface.

This is what I’ve got so far in my Stockfetcher code:

Show stocks where close is above 1.00
and average volume(30) is greater than 200000
and volume is greater than 50000
and average day point range(1) reached a new 7 day low
and average volume(3) has been decreasing for the last 5 days
and volume is more than 30% below volume 1 day ago
and volume is more than 30% below average volume(3)
and draw ema(5) and draw ema(30)
and date offset is 0

Most of those things are self explanatory. Average day point range(1) gives the range of the day in a clean way, and finding a 7 day low gives you an NR7. Stockfetcher can also do percentage range, but I’m not sure whether points or percentages are better to use. The volume statements are there to look for a volume contraction along with the range contraction. I used an average volume to allow for a bit of wiggling, though the volume trend will be right. I picked the different volume numbers and the 30% volume reduction to narrow the number of candidates. Date offset lets you see scan results from the past–an offset of 2 gives results from 2 days ago and so forth.

Looking back, the following symbols were results of a scan on Monday, 4/23:

SAI, ATHR, PIR, UTIW, WLT, ICFI, DLIA

Out of those, SAI, ATHR were triggered and were up today. The others didn’t trigger an entry, so no losers on that day. In my examinations on other days, some candidates have triggered an entry and then dropped to stop you out. The system and the scan still need work in that regard.

Running the scan today, I get the following stocks as NR7’s at the close:

JDSA JSDA, JASO, IMAX, ILE, AIXD

We’ll see how they do tomorrow. Please offer any suggestions to improve the system or the scan!

EDIT: Per the comments, here’s the new code that yields tons of results:

Show stocks where close is above 1.00
and average volume(30) is greater than 200000
and volume is greater than 50000
and average day point range(1) reached a new 7 day low
and volume is more than 30% below volume 1 day ago
and date offset is 0
/*Lines below are just for chart formatting*/
and draw ema(5) and draw ema(30)
and draw average day point range(1) 7 day high
and do not draw average volume(30)

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

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

Two trades today in a crazy market. There is still another hour left until the close, but I was done a while ago. My initial intra-day bias was short until some big volume printed on a drop in SPY. Too fast too soon as they say. We smartly reversed from there, and the Q’s made multi-year highs later on.
Trade1: ALTR

Trade 2: ADI

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This will be short because (1) I’m tired, and (2) Jaiku is down for maintenance, so I can’t link to all the great conversation there.

It was another frankly messed up day in the markets… with a flat open, and an up Dow with a down Nasdaq and S&P. That’s no fun. Like I’ve been pointing out every chance I get, stocks were very brittle near important daily numbers. No one wants to be the first to buy a stock up higher.

Still, the month is drawing to a close, and the bills I need to pay don’t care what kind of markets we’re having! You know, everyone says you shouldn’t trade when you’re focused on needing to make money, but my bills don’t care about that either! So, I tried to stay as alert as possible, and spot ideas (I normally just kinda zone out or take the day off if it doesn’t look promising). I ended up taking 3 scalping plays, for three wins. Feels good!

As usual, I looked for certain factors to line up:

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I have my own ways of handling drawdowns.  Normally, I decrease my size or even go back to paper trading.  And there is always this way — behavior modification at its finest!

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

I took a swing trade in Continental Airlines, Inc. (NYSE: CAL). Yes, It’s NYSE–This one turned out okay. It’s actually a really good example of using Rule #2 correctly!

I saw CAL make a strong bearish reversal on the daily chart:

I took a 1.3% portfolio risk position size in my initial trade. As it broke down further, I added another 0.7% risk position size, to make up my maximum risk of 2% if my stop was hit. When you trade this way, if the position immediately reverses, you’ll take a loss on a smaller position size than if you put the whole thing on in the beginning (in my case, the whole 2%). I got shaken out this morning since I was aggressively protecting my profit. I could have made my original target if I had held:

I’m not sure exactly how to report my profit/loss on these added trades yet, so here’s the results for both:

Trade Summary:

Initial: CAL Short 20 Shares
Entry: $41.69, Stop: $43.02, Target: $38.00
R: $26.60, Exit: $39.44
P/L: 1.69R, or $45.00

Add: CAL Short 10 Shares
Entry: $41.07, Stop: $43.02, Target: $38.00
R: $19.50, Exit: $39.44
P/L: 0.84R, or $16.30

Overall: P/L: $61.30

Trade Grade:

Stocks Mentioned In This Article
Stock	Links
CAL	| |

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

Three trades today.
Trade 1: OMNI SPY Setup

Trade 2: AG

Trade 3: JOYG

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