Gross: +32
Net: +27
Shares traded: 30,000
Trades: 192
Well, if I hadn't violated my rule of not flip-flopping which what I was doing right off the bat I probably would have done a lot better. One of my first trades was back on evil-ol' CDE and I got spanked for 1.5c on a double fill of my full share lot... which is admittedly low right now. But yeah, $30 after fees. From then I hit the plan and largely ignored CDE til the end of the day when i discovered I could jump the cue using Millenium while ignoring the stock for the most part (it wasn't really moving). I managed to make what I lost back doing that, and I think I will still do that in the future as well on stocks I can ignore and jump the cue on.
For the most part, I focused on three stocks: JNJ, WMT, and NEM. JNJ and NEM both tend to trend longer term and WMT is bounce-happy and ridiculously volatile. Also had one trade on EWT and a few brief forays onto S.
For a first day focusing almost exclusively on this style, I think I did not bad. I had numerous gains in the +5 to +11 point range. I did however make several particular mistakes repeatedly.
- A lot of my trades still lacked intent. I would buy with an intuitive sense that it was a good spot, and then decide afterward what exactly I planned to do with it. This lead to incorrect decisions on where to get out. Rather than taking the penny, I'd hold it and end up going offside and punching out at a loss. This cost me about 30-40 points over the day.
- A few times, I bought more into bad positions to average my price down. I absolutely have to get out of this habit... but at least it was on my mind every time I did it.
- I did not take advantage of nearly as many things as I could have. Partly this was distraction... I was not being aware enough of all that was happening in the stocks I had data on and missed at least 6 amazing breakouts on WMT alone.
- I averaged into good positions the wrong way... by buying at a high moment instead of waiting for a low.
- On several positions, I got out way too soon. If I'm on-side with the intent to hold... there is no point getting out from a small downturn. My best trade was on NEM for 10-11c and I should have held that position for most of the day as NEM continued to trend up again after a fairly long plateau. I could hae made 30-40c on that trade... and assuming I had averaged into it, that would have been ~100$ just on that trade.
I probably could have done more position reversing as well... but in retrospect I think that is something that can wait until I am more comfortable.
