This post was contributed by a guest author, and does not necessarily reflect the views of Richard or MovetheMarkets.com
Most days I trade part-time when I get the chance from work. Today I had the day off and nothing else to do, so I traded my first full-time day as a prop trader.
It was the hardest I’ve worked in years!! I placed 39 different transactions through a web-based interface, all from a single computer monitor. I was flying around windows and spreadsheets, charts–If I ever go full-time, I’ll buy another monitor and get better-than-free tools immediately! Plus, with the Fed jacking the markets up it was a crazy day. I traded almost $200,000 worth of stock today; there’s your trivia for the day.
I decided to crank my risk up as I discussed yesterday and play StreetSmack Style short scalps. At the open, we gapped down so hard that I faded it and went long CFC:
I went long as CFC went above the high if the first few candles with a stop at the day’s low. I added and removed at a few points, got confused and tried to sell some and ended up buying instead towards the end. I had no idea where I stood at that point risk-wise, so I just closed it all out at the purple line. Whoops.
The rest of the trades were short scalps. My worst case drawdown was -11%(!!) of my equity, and I finished up 6.7% on my equity when it was all over. Maybe the risk was cranked up too much (ya think)? Anyway, I’m glad to finish green on a day like today.
My paintbars served me quite well. They did the heavy lifting of telling me when to enter the first part of the position. I added inconsistently and bailed on some trades earlier than I should have, so my execution was off, but hey, it’s a new strategy for me. I depended on people calling out parabolic runners on Wallstreak, as I have no scan for those yet (Trade Ideas gets blocked by a firewall, so I can’t use that). Stewie made a dollar gainer scan on Prophet.net that he was using, so I’ll have to see if I can come up with something there.
In any event, I didn’t exactly follow the rules I set out for myself yesterday. I tried 8 short scalps–here’s the charts of the trades, some good, some bad (lightly annotated):
I’ll post an analysis of my rules and any changes I’ll make (I have a few ideas) over the weekend–for now, I need a break X_X
This post was contributed by a guest author, and does not necessarily reflect the views of Richard or MovetheMarkets.com
