Quitting at 1PM ET. Not enough on my radar to keep me entertained.
I remain undefeated this week. Go ahead and add comments calling it luck. I will laugh all the way to the bank. The teller will be delighted by my upbeat manner, and impressed by the size of my… deposit.
Ok, if I haven’t jinxed myself yet, surely I just did.
Just another scalp, this time for a meaty 20 cents, though. Of course it went on to run another 60 cents, rrgh, but I think that was based on some UN nerve gas scare. It recovered all that ground 3 minutes later, so I don’t feel too bad about missing that part of the drop.
August 30th, 2007 at 12:37 pm
Richard - just out of curiosity, why didn’t let your win run all the way as there wasn’t any exit signal to speak of for the other 60 cents? Did you set a personal target at 20 cents and got out when it was reached? Just trying to understand your rationale.
August 30th, 2007 at 12:46 pm
There’s never going to be an exit signal on a chart for scalps. I don’t even have the chart up during the trade itself. I only look at the bid/ask/last and try to gauge where the initial drop runs out of power. You have to understand that a 10 to 20 cent profit in a $65 stock can evaporate instantaneously… there’s no sense in watching a chart for a sign! In a very real sense, when scalping you are at the mercy of noise and widening spreads flattening you.
Sometimes the one push is all you get. See yesterday’s trade (I think? or maybe the day before) when I got out at the very top of the move I scalped. There was no exit signal on the chart, but I saw momentum waning. Another day, it might have retreated 5 cents and then run up further. The point of a scalp is not to participate in the retreat, no matter what happens afterwards.
In this ACH case, I’m pretty sure I said in the video I was hoping to take it down to the 65 area. An avg. exit price of 65.05ish was the best I could do with the spread in that stock, which unfortunately widened quite a bit once the drop was underway. It was a partially filled limit order converted to a market order to get out of the rest. But, that’s just what I wanted… if it had stalled out at 65.15, I’d have gotten out with 10 cents profit. You have to get out when the momentum stalls. That’s the only way to carry an over-sized position and not get screwed when a up or down draft moves against you.
August 30th, 2007 at 12:49 pm
great week richard…i’m sure the teller will be impressed by the size of ur (ahem) deposit…i just hope its a female :-)
August 30th, 2007 at 4:49 pm
From your chart set-up, I noticed three inidcators on the bottom. You have the volume, and On Balaance volume indicators, but what is ECO? Thanks
August 30th, 2007 at 5:19 pm
Luck-eee!
August 30th, 2007 at 5:21 pm
It’s the ergodic candle oscillator. You pretty much read it like an MACD, though it’s measuring something completely different. It’s basically a doubly-smoothed ratio of the strength of the candle bodies compared to the full candle range. So, when candles are decisive (not much wick on the chart) the oscillator tends to run + or -, and when the candles are indecisive, it tends toward 0. So, it has nice properties like it can trend much longer than MACD, and is not fooled by gaps, etc.
September 4th, 2007 at 12:28 am
new to topics of daytrading, especially scalping. Great vid. in a trade this quick, do you even have time to set actual/physical stop-loss orders? Or do you just keep your eye on the levelII, and on the ‘trigger’ to cover/sell when you see enough slowness/reversal
September 4th, 2007 at 12:14 pm
greg, I almost never use a real stop-loss order, unless I have to leave my desk for some reason. The videos are a good way for me to describe why I got in the trade, but they don’t show at all how I act during the trade itself. In fact I am not ever looking at a chart at all when in a trade… just the level 1 bid/ask/last/volume. I don’t use Level 2/Totalview much, though I sometimes check it prior to entering a trade.