Long-time readers know that, every month since I’ve started, I’ve been wanting to work on my trade-rate. Well, unless May turns out to be an anomaly, I’ve finally reached a level I’m happy with. I made twice as many trades this month as last month, while maintaining a good win rate and expectancy. There were only three trading days where I could not find a trade I wanted. Check out May’s Calendar View of my trading, compared to April’s Calendar View (not to mention, lousy February…).

I’ll cite two contributing factors to my increase in trade rate (unless it turns out to be an anomaly this month, which would make the next couple paragraphs complete BS):

1. I did an investigation and wound-up switching to point and figure charts as my primary trading chart (for both daily and intraday views). I took five trades this month that I consider “point-and-figure”-specific plays, but at present I’m still primarily scalping. I just spot the moves on point and figure charts, rather than another kind.

   A big benefit of pnf charts (and, really, volume charts as well) is that they tend to break out more detail about the price action at the open. As such, I’ve found myself suddenly able to trade during that all-important first hour of trading. It’s been a huge help. Back when I was watching 15′ or 30′ charts, the morning hour was basically an information void that I couldn’t safely trade against.

2. Hanging out on wallstreak and jaiku has been helpful, because especially on wallstreak people keep asking me what I think of stocks. I would normally never look at most of those stocks, because of how thinly they trade. But, once I pull the chart up to give my opinion, I find myself identifying trades I want to take. I’ve had some success with the thinner stocks, but I have to use limit orders to get out, which bugs me.

May also saw my 2007 profit reach 100R. Here’s hoping it reaches 200R by December! That would rule. Here’s the R-chart from 2007 so far, courtesy of StockTickr (the blue line is a 20MA of the profits):

As you may have noticed, I’ve started to review my trades from a year ago, and it’s making me curious about why I abandoned the trading ideas I used to employ. It’s early yet, but right now I think the ideas were decent, but that my execution was all over the place. So, just today, I tentatively reintroduced the “ema-reversion” idea, with some success. Maybe more will be coming. Or maybe that was the only good idea I had back then! Time will tell.

I’m too lazy to do all the tables tonight, and tomorrow I have my 30th Birthday to contend with, so we’ll just do the summary table this time, and return to the more detailed stuff at the end of June.

Overall Performance as of May 2007

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:

Read the rest of this entry »

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

No gap plays for me again today. I didn’t see any really great setups. I am being very choosey, and it is paying off the last couple of weeks. Unfortunately, I had my first losing month in 8 months, down R 2.9. It is good I had a losing month, as it improved my trading by forcing me to look for the BEST setups. Today I traded SPY as per Oscar’s recommendation.
SPY Trade Short:

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

Was I profitable? Oh yes. If you look at my StockTickr calendar view, you’ll see that I only lost money one day this month. Also, until the last week of the month, I was making trades at least three days a week. Pretty good, for me, though I’m always trying to improve in that area.

What happened the last week? Well, I rarely trade Thursdays anyway, and I had connectivity issues on Wednesday, so that hurt. Also, I think I just (for whatever reason) was too slow to hit the big moves in time. I probably need more sleep!

I hereby declare March the “Month of Twitter“! Once I put their badge on my blog, several others quickly followed. Now, we have a pretty thriving community of twittering stock bloggers. I think it’s a much more efficient way to exchange thoughts and ideas than instant messaging. It’s less “chatty,” though it does degenerate into chat-like atmosphere at times. If you haven’t joined the fun, please do! Yes, they are overwhelmed by their sudden popularity, but have some faith that they will fix their server issues soon enough!

As I mentioned previously I’m going to report performance along each trade type from now on. So, that means lots more tables! Hopefully you’ll find it interesting, but if not the overall summary table is still here like always. I’m also going to start doing year-to-date alongside the monthly numbers. All of this is pulled right out of StockTickr, by the way…

Let’s get started! (If you want to know more about what the trade types mean, check out the post about them, which has the definitions I’m using) Here are the tables:

Read the rest of this entry »

On paper, February was not very kind to me. You can see on the StockTickr Calendar View that I traded very little (7 trades versus 17 in January). And, my returns were a pretty meager 1.52 R in the end. Net positive after commissions, but not by much!

So, I am not sorry at all to see February go. Lots of choppy, overbought behavior was keeping breakouts in check. But, I can’t blame the markets, really… it’s mostly a matter of me sleeping at the wrong times. Several days I recall stalking stocks, only to give in and go to sleep before they finally broke. Oh well… most of the time I’d rather be rested than a little richer. But, when doing a month in review post, it starts to look bad after a few weeks.

Luckily, January was very good.

Here’s the table:

If I don’t sound concerned, it’s because I am noting that I have been spotting more good trades than ever, lately… I’ve just been pathetic at managing to catch them in February. Let’s see what we can do about that in March! (uh.. but not tomorrow… I’ve got other plans!)

I guess the only other standout thing about February was the big reminder of a daytrader’s advantage… no exposure to that big drop a couple days ago. That felt nice (though not as nice as massive short exposure would have felt!).

If you check out the StockTickr calendar view, you’ll see that I rarely wound up making trades Thursdays and Fridays. Thursdays, I generally have other stuff to do for a lot of the trading day. Fridays this month were… just plain boring. Still, my P&L, as well as my trade count, were much higher this month, compared to just 6 trades in December. I had one losing day this month, where I was 0 for 4. Until I went and re-read that day’s entry, I didn’t even remember it. I guess that’s a good thing. Man, that day looked like it sucked :-) But, I kept my losses under control.

Here are my results (which you can also view on stocktickr any time you want):

I continue to focus on finding more trades to take per month, to both make more money and ensure that I’m consistently profitable. Obviously, I’m having fun trying out the Box Play, which so far has a 100% win rate for me. We’ll see how far into February that lasts…

You can see on the StockTickr calendar view, that trading was light in December. That’s mostly due to the fact that I took off two weeks of the month. Still I managed to get 3.83 R, and I really only shoot for around 5 to 8 R per full month of trading. So, I count this as pretty good performance.

Here are my results (which you can also view on stocktickr any time you want):

It feels like I haven’t traded in a long time… I can’t wait for the markets to open wednesday (although I will probably spend some time feeling things out, so I may not trade til later in the week… we’ll see!). Right now, I seem to be sleeping from about 3PM EST to 11PM EST, so I should be able to trade as my last activity before sleeping. I guess, if that stays stable, I could just go with it…

ehh…. it’s a fact that I’ve never had a losing month in my daytrading career, but November was the closest I’ve ever come to it. I totaled a measly 0.32 R.

You can see on the StockTickr calendar view, that a couple things went wrong this month. First off, I only seemed to find trades on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. I made very few trades total. Secondly, the last week of November I had nothing but losses (3 whole trades), which severely cut into my profits.

The main thing about November that stands out to me, besides not making many trades, is that for the majority of my losers, I was right about the stock direction, but stopped out anyway. I’ve come to the conclusion that the last two months were not a good match for my particular style of trading. I’ve noted based on feedback I get from folks that they are getting better results from my own watchlists than I am! :-) So, the big question is: is it a temporary thing, or do I need to be adjusting my style? hmmm… I think the constant new highs new highs everyday has just made the action at breakout levels much more choppy than it had been before. I may need to execute my trades slightly differently until that changes.

So, two profitable but unspectacular months in a row. That’s why I think it’s funny that I got a comment today saying something like, “it’s all fine and good that you post your trades after the fact, but I wonder if you have the guts to post a screenshot of your broker! No one will believe you otherwise.” Maybe I’m not the best liar in the world, but I think if I were lying I would have at least made up a more successful story. :-) But, anyway, ask and ye shall receive…

They didn’t say what they wanted in the screenshot, but I assume they just want my broker’s homepage, right? ;-)

You may or may not have noticed I’ve stopped with the weekly review posts, and I was considering stopping the monthly review posts. The reason is, I always say the same thing in them, and the statistics are right out of StockTickr (just ask for the last 30 days, or whatever… it’s been on my list to add a way to pick start/end dates for that report). Anyone can look at that, and the aforementioned calendar review page, anytime they want. Plus, no one seemed to notice that I stopped, or if they did, they didn’t care enough to ask about it.

Now go re-read Zoomie’s November review, and I bet it will sound even more impressive than it did the first time!

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

November was a good month for me profit-wise. I let my winners run to their targets, and that made all the difference in my profit/loss column. More importantly, I learned some valuable lessons that I’ll apply from here on out. First, I will continue to cut losses, but I won’t hastily exit trades. My “tape reading” was more about fear of loss, and it caused me to exit trades prematurely. I will, for the most part, stick to letting the candle close before I decide whether or not a trade is proving correct. Secondly, I will not “revenge trade” thanks to some new rules taped to my monitor and forehead. That nasty habit cost me -5.4 R over only two trading days. I traded .67% of my account on each trade. Here are my results:

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

It’s hard to think of September without wincing. I thought August was a bad month for trading, but this month was even more difficult, in terms of good opportunities. On a more positive note, I think I responded to the challenge correctly. I made few trades, but they were of high quality from a win-rate perspective. I traded 3 of the 4 weeks (I like to count my months on week boundaries, so I consider September to be the four weeks from 9/4 to 9/30), and only found 10 trades I wanted.

Even then, I was taking tighter and tighter profits, so I was making less money per trade than I was in August. Here are the stats:

So, a 5R month. As a rule, I don’t maintain or try to work toward profit targets. I think that messes with my ability to make good decisions. But, to give you an idea of what it means, I can live a pretty austere existance on 4 to 5 of my-sized R’s a month. On the other hand, 8 to 10 R means I live comfortably, and possibly even put away some money.

So, 5R isn’t bad, but I spent more this month than I made. If there’s one thing I can’t do, it’s live austerely! :-) It’s not really a cause for concern, as long as that doesn’t continue. I’m always making improvements, and am generally ahead of schedule in improving my profitability (I had said in my StockTickr interview that it was my goal to consistently cover my living expenses by early 2007, and until this month I’ve already been doing that).

R Chart for September (click to enlarge):

Cumulative R Chart since returning to daytrading on July 12th (click to enlarge):

August was a tough one! I took this week off, and since I see others already posting their month reviews, I thought I’d go ahead and do mine.

Here are the stats for August (includes 7/31 and 9/01 so we cover full weeks):

If you compare with last month’s stats, you can see by the lower win rate that I struggled a little bit. I made more money, but not in proportion to how many more trades I took. It’s also apparent on the graph below (click to enlarge) that I had a stretch where my losses cancelled out my wins. Those are hard on me, as it doesn’t take long at all to feel like I’m in a rut.

Still, to have 9 R while taking a full week off meets my financial and personal needs. The way August punished so many of us, I consider it a real accomplishment, actually.

So, what lessons does August teach? I’d say this month reiterated the importance of listening to market context. We were in choppy, low-volume markets. I saw my performance, and that of other bloggers, lagging the norm. I saw highchartpatterns.com warning about a difficult month. So, I eased way up on my goal of riding my winners longer. Even when I let a trade run, I chose sub-2R price targets. I tried to avoid trading trendy, directional price moves, because those were turning back around so often by mid-day. Instead, I mainly wanted to trade high-volume breakouts of important price levels, because those seemed more reliable this month. Whether these adjustments helped, or whether it was just luck, I’ll never know. But, it’s plain on the graph that by mid-month I had broken out of my rut.

A really light month, trading-wise. First and foremost, recall that I was ill for the first two weeks of July. So, this was more-or-less a two week month for me. And, I just have not seen many trades I wanted to take over the last two weeks. As I mentioned in my weekly review post, I will be doing some serious chart review this weekend to see if the trades aren’t there, or if I’m just not seeing them for some reason.

On the other hand, 6 of my 7 trades were winners, so it may really be that I’d rather focus entirely on getting more profits out of fewer trades. I mean, at 1% R, it only takes 8.4 R a month to have a 100% return for the year, right? I am close to that with my lowly 7 trades.

Here are the stats for July:

I’m also not happy that my biggest winner was only 2 R this month. I’ve supposedly been working on not leaving money on the table, but I haven’t seen any results from that effort, yet.

Here is the R P/L chart (click to enlarge):

My records show three trades from early July that didn’t make it into StockTickr, as I didn’t have StockTickr quite as embedded into my workflow as I do now. Next month’s report will be completely inclusive.

I’ve started making these posts because I enjoy the performance reports I see at ugly’s blog so much. I wish all active traders would share their performance, and their thoughts on their performance. It helps traders who trade in isolation (like me!) to understand what the climate is like. For instance, is everyone else trading 100 times a day, or has everyone been trading lighter lately? That helps me understand my recent undertrading in context.