Whew! I was very sleepy today. I was even seeing secret messages in my trade-ideas alerts! It didn’t help that the markets were pretty quiet and choppy all day, which lured me into 10 trades. 7 of them were winners, though most of the winners were small. In the video, I go over the 3 losses, since there’s no way I could fit all 10 trades into 10 minutes.

I don’t know if the hidden messages will show up clearly in the video, so here are the screenshots:

Clearly, trade-ideas became self-aware and was trying to tell me when Chinese Democracy would be released. “When Axl Rose has ‘lncr’, rock.”

Shortly after that, I may have gotten a clue that it was actually a human hacking into the system and sending me the messages:

So, “I’m in the WSO”, eh? I bet it’s “Wichita Symphony Orchestra,” but I’m not sure…

Watch this post's video on Youtube

What can I say about today? I think I traded like I planned to. Had some bad luck.

A lot of my stocks hit their trigger points shortly after 10 or 10:30. Too many to keep up with, in fact! It was an unfortunate situation where:

• They were just running up without setting up first
• Most of them were stalling out, or reversing

So… to avoid being left out completely, I scalped Rowan Companies, Inc. (NYSE: RDC) for a little money, but not much. Then it ran up in a pretty orderly fashion the entire rest of the day. Damn! Not bothering with the chart on this 1-minute scalp.

A little later, I saw a pretty good-looking setup in Delta Petroleum Corp. (Nasdaq: DPTR). A kind of ascending triangle with increasing volume, right under 27. It had been building for an hour and a half, almost. Looked good on the 5 and 10 minute charts. Even looked decent on 30 minute charts, though the wicks were a little long. So, I bought the break through 27. I got filled all the way up to 27.07, but still had a good basis of about 27.03.

Then, the tick went pretty negative. Good grief, this was like a flashback from my week of endless pain a few weeks back. Then, the stock fell below my entry to 26.95 or so, and was hovering there. At this point, I had two thoughts:

1. If this stock can’t hold above 26.90, I’m getting out.
2. It’s holding up pretty well compared to the way the markets are acting at the moment.

Now, when I thought #2, I wasn’t rationalizing, or imagining anything. The markets were very negative, and for about 10 minutes, DPTR was holding up flat. But, it seems like, whenever I have that thought, the stock never goes back up. I should make a note that whenever I think that, it’s just time to bail. Plain and simple. (if you read through some of my losing trades over the last month or so, you’ll see me saying “it was holding up well compared to the TICKS,” etc. a bunch).

Anyway, 26.92. come on… 26.91… 26.94… go baby, go! then, the bid popped from 26.91 to 26.81. Huh? I hate sudden 15 cent spreads on a $26 stock. That’s a nightmare. Knowing I was going to get filled at the bid regardless, I paused a moment to see if the ask would drop, or if the bid would rise. (Keep in mind, my 1R stop was at 26.75, so I had some room). The bid did go up, to 26.84, at which point I issued my sell order to get out. I was filled all the way down to 26.71. Good grief! But, oddly enough, my average exit price was right at my 26.75 stop (within a fraction of a penny, anyway). So, not a fun trade.

I watched NVDA run through my target and reverse. I watched SIRF try a few times to break out. And the whole time, RDC just kept waltzing up without me.

So, the other thing that I think about after having a few days like this recently: it seems like the bad setups that I skip are working better than the good ones that I take. If that makes sense. The cleanest setups I’m finding seem to all pop and reverse on me. Meanwhile, the stocks that rage through my buy number from 50 cents below it seem to keep on going. Maybe the “good” setups are too obvious to be good. I blame the computers. :-)

The Evolution of Comment Spam
For those of you without a blog, I thought you might like a glimpse of what I see about 60 of every damn day. Comment spam is usually pretty easy to spot. Surprisingly often, they are just a series of links to porn sites:

{link} {link} {link}

… Once I’ve determined it’s not a genuine semi-pornographic comment from tale of the tape, I just delete it. :-)

When they are not just a list of links, they frequently take the form:

Nice site look this: {link}

… uh, not very sneaky. Sometimes they are a bit more elaborate:

Hi, I really like your site. Where is the FAQ? I thought you might like to see {link} {link} {link}

or:

I think something’s wrong with your site today. I can’t seem to find what I was reading yesterday. Look this: {link} {link} {link}

(I love how, after all that good grammar, at the punchline they often revert to “look this”.)

Then, the other day, I got a very very sneaky one, that I had to stare at for a long time. It had no links in it, other than the commenter’s url. But, the text was pretty vague, and not really related to the article. I went to the url, and it was a page full of nothing but ads. I wish I had kept it to present here, but it was perfectly good English, and not very spammy. Yes, I can critique the english proficiency of others and use spammy in the same sentence. :-)

I hope that last trend does not continue. It makes it a lot more time consuming to tell what is spam, and what isn’t. And, I am trying to avoid using those anti-spam “type in these fuzzy warped letters” systems. We’ll just have to see.

Stocks Mentioned In This Article
Stock	Links
RDC	| |
DPTR	| |

It was an unusual day for me. First, I overslept, and the trading gods punished me for it by making some of the best picks from my scans cross their triggers early in the session. So, I missed a lot of nice morning action. That’s really too bad, but then again, it’s nice to be well rested, too! :-) Life is good…

So, with the main list candidates already through their target prices, and an FOMC event coming up, I nearly just walked away. Instead, I thought it might be fun to scalp on RDC some (it was one of the profitable candidates I missed). I traded it 3 times, for 2 wins and 1 loss.

Ok, so the Rowan Companies, Inc. (NYSE: RDC) trades:

First I bought the break of 35.00 around 11:50. My target was the HOD, since I thought it would run up to it and fail. I got characteristically jittery since the dow was pretty negative, though, and bailed too early so I would start the day with some profit.

Then, completely contradicting the logic from my first trade, I bought the new HOD. It was acting pretty strong, so I called it a “just in case” trade. As I had previously expected, it failed, and I got out for a mere 4 cent loss. No big deal. At least I didn’t let it go all the way to my stop like last week!

As it kept failing, I decided to enter a trade when it fell through the trough between the double top. (you can see it @ 34.86 or so at around 11:15). So, to avoid getting mindlessly chopped up again, I let it drop to 34.80 before going short. It stalled out @ 34.73, and I bailed at 34.74. That turned out to be a good decision, as it was stuck between 34.70 and the HOD for the rest of the trading session.

What can we learn from this and several of my trades last week? Stocks are not breaking out at HOD or LOD very reliably right now. They just, aren’t, unless they have a ton of volume. It would actually make me a lot more money to short the HOD and go long the LOD, but I am not quite ready to put a strategy like that into effect yet. Would have worked out great today, though…

I haven’t totalled it up, but I can tell in R terms that I haven’t made up for last week’s losses, yet. But, it sure feels good to be making money again! And, even having taken Monday off, I already traded 5 times this week, so I’ve still kept my number of trades up a little from my July-September timeframe. That’s all very good.

Stocks Mentioned In This Article
Stock	Links
RDC	| |