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

It’s well known that two heads are better than one. I was never sure how this would translate into trading, but the answer revealed itself in ….. WallStreak!

First there was Twitter, then came Jaiku, and now it has evolved into WallStreak. What is WallStreak, you say? Well, if you are already Twittering or Jaiku’ing, how would you want to tweak it so that it would be more useful for traders? Well, I think that’s basically what WallStreak is.

TapeWorm had already wrote about some of the benefits of WallStreak. I think one additional benefit is that we can throw trading ideas around, sort of like brainstorming, with WallStreak being our virtual blackboard. For instance, yesterday, I went into a brief discussion with Ugly and Tapeworm regarding why I thought going long ES at a certain price level was not such a great idea. Explaining that actually helped to solidify my own thought process as well, so we all benefitted. I also learned about PMA’s from TapeWorm from WallStreaking. I think WallStreak is a good platform to toss around ideas like that. It’s pretty cool to be able to collaborate like that.

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

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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I’ve been basically taking half-days this week so far, due to my messed-up sleeping habits! I’m about to go to sleep now, at 12:30PM EST or so. There is more good conversation on jaiku every day, so I hope some of you blog readers are watching. It can be pretty informative.

Anyway, like yesterday, I did manage to make a pretty uninteresting scalp. This time it was on EIX (Edison International). EIX was one of the stocks I mentioned I would be watching today. I got out just 1.6 cents below what looks likely to be the high of the day. So, good for me! That’s about as good as it gets, when you exit with a market order. :-) It was for 1.33 R, but actually made more $ than the 4 R scalp I made yesterday. The stop was a little wider on this one, and I felt comfortable taking on a little more risk that way. I know that sounds backwards, but with 1 and 2 cent stops, there’s only so many shares I can stomach buying. With a 4 or 5 cent stop like today, I feel like I’ve got room to breathe.

Hopefully sometime this week I’ll be awake at a time when a good trade setup (like a triangle or a box play) will set up nicely. There just hasn’t been anything I can find in time so far this week. I’m probably just too groggy from no sleep to spot anything.

Web2.0 users are a fickle, unfaithful bunch… Initially, I was a little annoyed at the sudden interest in jaiku. After all, I love twitter and am patiently waiting for stability and features to come along. But, having played with jaiku for a couple days, I’m considering switching.

The two services are extremely similar, but jaiku has a few more features. The “killer” feature is commenting. Unlike twitter, you can comment on jaiku entries. Twitter-ers already do their best to emulate this via “@user: blah” formatted updates. But, that is far from perfect.

Other things I initially didn’t like about jaiku:

• it encourages you to put all your feeds in your update stream. I thought this would get old awfully fast. After all, I use a news aggregator to read my rss feeds… why would I want to use jaiku as a second-rate newsreader? But, it turns out that when I add someone as a friend, I can select which of their feeds I want to follow, if any. Brilliant!
• no mobile or IM interface like twitter has. I bet these are coming, as there is an API. But, if not, I can simply use twitter for my mobile updates, and these updates will be sent to my jaiku page via RSS. And people can still comment on it. Cool!
• no way to manage comments, that I could see. This seems to have been addressed now, as I have the option to delete comments on my updates. problem solved (except no way to ban an obnoxious user, but I bet that will eventually show up, too).
• no auto-update like twitter does. Or should I say did… Twitter went from 2 minute updates to 10, to not even mentioning it anymore… So, in both cases I’m hitting refresh a lot.

So, I am considering making the switch, even though there are good chances that twitter feels the pressure and rolls out these same features in short order. What to do?? Well, starting tomorrow I’ll be making all my web-based updates on jaiku, to see how it works out. Feel free to join me! Hey, a lot of you ended up liking twitter, no? Give jaiku a try… I am at http://richardtodd.jaiku.com/.