This post was contributed by a guest author, and does not necessarily reflect the views of Richard or MovetheMarkets.com
No trades yesterday. Two trades today in this crazy market.
Trade 1: OXY
Trade 2: GME
This post was contributed by a guest author, and does not necessarily reflect the views of Richard or MovetheMarkets.com
Just in case Zoomie didn’t start outperforming me today, I decided to erase all my gains for the week. I am such a humanitarian. If only I could eat humanitarian awards, and burn their packaging to keep my apartment warm… :-) Okay, that was over-dramatic…
Anyway, since we had several waves of big negative $TICK’s, and several stocks hovering around their lows, I found 6 trades I wanted to make. I made 4 of them, and managed to take small losses on each. All 6 would have broken even at best, the way I would have managed the trades. Wherever the stocks were that knew how to break out of their opening range, I wasn’t watching them today!
To top it off, the first trade I made today was by accident! I sent the order when I only meant to fill it out. Still, it wasn’t a terrible entry, and I thought I had a good chance of making a profit. Wrong! So, my first two trades of the day (1 intentional, 1 unintentional) were on Occidental Petroleum Corporation (NYSE: OXY):
(all these are going to be 10-min charts, by the way)
Here’s two false starts from American Airlines (NYSE: AMR):
NYSE not treating me well.. how ’bout nasdaq? BAIDU (Nasdaq: BIDU):
or maybe Broadcom (Nasdaq: BRCM)?
fine… how about nVidia (Nasdaq: NVDA)?
To be fair, NVDA acted better than anything else I’ve shown so far, but it still moved back through the entry after the trade had been open 70 minutes… not exactly what you want to see…
Well, I’ve tried oil, airlines, tech, chinese tech… how bout some gold trust (NYSE: GLD)?
Summary
You won’t find me saying any day is bad. I have an amazing life even when I’m bleeding cash. But today was certainly not profitable. It’s not as bad as I might have made it sound, though… I liked the trades I made… and I haven’t totalled it up yet, but I lost a little over 1R across 4 losing trades, which isn’t bad at all. Just one good trade will cancel out all of these.
[EDIT: okay, StockTickr says it totals to 1.07R I lost today. Not a big deal... just a lot of trades with no profit to show for it...]
| Stocks Mentioned In This Article | |
|---|---|
| Stock | Links |
| OXY |  |  |  |
| AMR | | | |
| BIDU | | | |
| BRCM | | | |
| NVDA | | | |
| GLD | | | |
I only started watching the markets after 12:00 EST or so today, and by then it was clear we were having another down up down flat down day. So, I was a little disappointed, but in general fine with not making any trades today.
Then, towards the close, I had an idea. I thought to myself, gold, natural gas, and oil are the only up sectors I see. Why not go long a decent looking oil stock about now? The theory being, as people shore up their positions at the end of the week, they’ll pull money out of a bad sector and throw it into a good one.
Was my theory correct? I don’t know. I’ll note that the gold and oil indices I watch closed on their highs for the day. But, I guess I would have expected the weaker sectors to get even weaker, and I didn’t see that.
Anyway, I chose Occidental Petroleum Corp. (NYSE: OXY), since it had consolidated and was breaking out on the upside. The breakout stalled, but didn’t get anywhere near my stop. Sure enough, right at the end of the day, it surged up for a bit. But, since I never trade at EOD, I was skittish, and just grabbed a few cents of profit (0.2R) I could have gotten 0.4R if I had been just a tad more patient. I may keep making small bets on ideas like this and see if they continue to work out for me.
Here’s the chart (click to enlarge):
If you compare OXY to the DIA/SPY and $XOI, you can see that the biggest dip agaist me corresponded to a time when the markets and oil in general were down. But, oil rebounded, and I was able to stick with it until it based under my entry and broke through it again.
| Stocks Mentioned In This Article | |
|---|---|
| Stock | Links |
| OXY | | | |
The weather in Dallas is too good to pass up today, and the markets were confusing me. So, I practiced what I preach, and I walked away.
I made 0.4 R on a break-even trade and a little scalp on OXY (I should have chosen XOM over OXY, though, in hindsight). Looks like oil and gold were good places to be today. The break-even trade was on RACK, which tried really hard to break out of its channel, and held up really well in the market downturns. But, at least while I was watching it, it failed to really go anywhere.