Gross: -92
Net: -123
Shares traded: about 50,000
Trades: 67
Well... today was very very frustrating. I began the day avoiding the thin stocks because they were either completely berserk like WMT or pretty flat. Neither is a way to make money on thin stocks. This didn't actually change much until the big tank... at which point I was pretty tied up in other things and missed out. They were rickety drops though anyways... needed guts to hold those.
So what I did was continue what I was doing on CDE at the end of yesterday - jumping ahead of the queue on SLR, CDE, ILA, and F. All thick stocks that don't move a lot. Also played EWM and EWT. I was doing fine on everything until it all began crashing. CDE dropped from 3.71-.72 down to 3.67-.68 in literally less than 5 seconds. I happened to be long and took a massive hit. I started fighting my way back when it all happened again but on everything I was playing. In the end, -72 of my -90 was on CDE. Some people made a mint on that but most tried catching the repeated false rebounds happening frequently and took a spanking.
So here I am 4 days into the month and exactly in the reverse position of where I should be... down 450$. This is going to be an almost insurmountable road back up and has shaken my morale to the core.
What really has me shaken here, actually, is that what I have been seeing over the past 5 months is ever increasing instability in the market. Overall, things look as though they are calming and then for a week or more straight you get crazy instability. Reading the online blogs of other traders out there, they seem to agree that things are not great and getting worse. This is fine if all I do is play the volatility... but I will absolutely get fired if that is all I do. They don't want that no matter how much money you are making. And of course... relearning this is going to take more time than I have before I run out of money. I HAVE to get a cheque sometime this month... whether from trading or some other job.
Furthermore... older traders are leaving the office. Finding other jobs with more stability and otherwise. We have only had 2 graduates since august last year... and both of them are in the whole over 1k each after these first three days and didn't make any money last month either.
I will continue trading... but I am officially looking for another career as of today. This is very very disheartening. I've put many months into this now and don't really have a lot to show for it except a whack-load more debt and a questionably-useful understanding of the market. And of course... this is a dream-career for me... it's very hard to let go of dreams.
