Wow, I took three trades in one day! And, two of them were winners, so not a bad day. I still wish I didn’t trade the loser, though. *sigh* So, let’s get that one out of the way first!
Mar
14
If you are in an orchestra, I wouldn’t suggest playing the triangle. You’ll get no respect. But, in the stock markets, it’s a whole different story. I like triangles because they are easy to spot, fairly reliable, and have a built-in method for choosing a price target. You can play breakouts from triangles in either direction.
Here’s a really nice one that I missed today, on NVDA. Had I spotted it in time, I would definitely have taken this trade.
Mar
14
On twitter we were talking about CTV this morning. About an hour into the session, I pointed out I’d like to see CTV consolidate for awhile, and then blow past 41.50. Well, I bought into a pretty sloppy ascending triangle, for 1.2R.
Mar
7
A scalp like this is one of my “pay the bills” plays… little, reliable plays that I can usually find if I’m willing to look hard enough. As I get toward the end of the month, if I’m feeling the pressure to pay some bills, I get motivated to wake up on time and find these suckers. A few months back when I had a 100% win rate for 40 days or so, I was basically doing nothing but this move.
Mar
5
From my twitter feed:
- 17 minutes ago
- just had longest market order fill ever on CE… 2.5 minutes! I wanted 29.40 but got 29.53. Bastards! Broker investigating…
- 3 minutes ago
- scottrade price-improved me to 29.40 on my bad CE fill. So, when I called them bastards, what I meant was, they rule. :-)
Here’s the 10-minute chart of the trade on Celanese Corporation (NYSE: CE). The blue lines mark the (admittedly sloppy) ascending triangle I was using as the basis of the trade. My stop was under the lower trendline. My target was a push above the HOD, which was 2R away. It was hit fairly quickly.
Now, about that fill… Two and a half minutes, on a market order. “My, this order is taking a long time,” I observed calmly. Yeah, right! I was severely pissed off. I watched lots of prints go by. The price walked up 15 cents from my intended entry at 29.40, with thousands of shares trading. I tried to cancel my order several times, but it wouldn’t let me since it was a NYSE market order that was in the queue already. Talk about a helpless feeling! Plus, since I was finally filled as the price was on the way down from its initial spike, I started off this trade in the red. That was no fun!
But, I held it together, and waited for the price to run up again. Luckily, it never went below 29.35 or so. At 29.33, I would have been in the red by my intended 1R amount, and I’d have to make a hard decision about bailing, or sticking to my original stop loss point (which would mean risking more than I initially intended to risk).
After I was out of the trade, I called up Scottrade. I’ve only done that a couple times, but it has always been a very pleasant experience. They looked at the trade, and about 15 minutes later they price improved me to the ask price at the time I entered my order. Very nice! Even though other brokers have more frills, it’s stuff like this that keeps me with scottrade. Plus, I know if it ever gets really bad I can go down the street to their office and yell at someone in person. Gotta love that.
| Stocks Mentioned In This Article | |
|---|---|
| Stock | Links |
| CE |  |  |  |