Trader Mom @ Home

My trading has been crawling like a snail ,slowly but surely.  I am not worried about the loss/gain at the end of each day.  If I make 1000 today and do not know how I made it, I will not be happy at all since I will give the money back very soon.   I must know why. Therefore, I try to focus on executions only,  which is quite hard to do.  If your executions are right, money will come.   Today’s trading is a perfect example.

I took 27 trades today.  Most of them died silently.   There were a few good ones such as POT and OI. But I botched them up.  I did not hold onto them.  I realized that and tried to hold onto my long in X in the afternoon.  But X did not move much.  You can see all the trades in my portfolio, in which I post my trades in real time.

Here are the 5 min charts for POT and OI.   My timing/entries could NOT be better.  Yet I let them slip through my fingers.  I shorted 350 shares of OI @ 29.22. It moved all the way down to 28.25 without any pause.   I shorted POT first @ 112.14 and then @ 111.75.  It moved all the way down to 106.87.  If I had caught half of the moves in OI and POT, I would have been up 1000.  So 27 trades in total, all I needed was these 2 guys.  Yet they slipped away.   It is sad.  But there are opportunities like those every day.   What is better than trading?  It is certainly not your day job.

 
Click on the image to have a better view

Here is why I shorted POT and OI at those levels.

I did not short either of them during the first drop. So I watched how they behaved. A strong stock normally would not tank so much 60 minutes into the session. These 2 guys were relatively weak. So the action was to short. Then I looked for a short entry. My entries were right after the first bounce-back. It is similar to buying dips in a uptrend. The reason they slipped away was because I did not have the conviction.

There are a few good things about today’s’ trading though

1: I was as slippery as an eel too by jumping in and out of my positions rapidly. I was basically dodging bullets from my enemies.
2: I went long on some stocks today. I promised myself to balance my trading a little bit since I shorted stocks way too much.
3: I was flexible enough to flip to the short side right after I closed my longs in X and HANS near the close.

To be able to flip to either side in a heart beat is ultra important for me.  I used to be able to do that.   I need to get that kind of feeling back.  In trading, there is no time to think.  You react by reflex.   You acquire reflex by placing thousands of trades per year.