Somewhat of a choppy day for me and I ended up taking a couple of trades that weren’t my main setups that lead to some underperformance. On the plus-side since my risk management is in check the most I’m taking a hit per day is like 1.5%, which in thee grand scheme of things isn’t a crushing blow to say the least.
After talking to my guy @dixontierney today and picking his brain on his risk management I decided to tighten the reigns in a little bit more, which I think will help the big picture idea.
I’ll be honest and say the numbers feel a bit tight, but given that everything is R the math just makes sense. Special s/o to him for sharing with me some of his ideas there (remember that thing I was saying about having good people around….another great example here).
If there/s one big takeaway from today I think it’s the importance of me paying attention to my setups and the CRITERIA for it. You can talk yourself into thinking that you followed your steps for grading a setup, but the reality is there are times were we can selectively skip over key criteria and it’s important to remember that selecting the prey is just as important and striking the prey.
Take the lion for instance
I’m trying to be like a lion. I want the old weak prey for better conversion. You need to know what you’re hunting and WHY. You’re not always going to get it right, but the premarket gives us enough time to get a good idea of what we’re dealing with.
One of the key criteria that I need to watch out for is I/O for the setups that I want to trade. Higher I/O is not a good thing, so if I know that then why am I trying to find a way to trade the name when it has it. There are enough setups out there for me to ignore those. Who cares if it does do what I want, in the grand scheme of things it didn’t fit what I was looking for in the first place. Me trying to say that it’s ok because of XY is like me saying I’m ok with going out to buy a 991.1 Porsche 911 GT3 and coming back with a 02′ Mazda Miata. Sure both can drive and do some fun things at the track, but the the GT3 is the thing that will deliver the experience that I want and the Miata might have an oil leak, a blown trans seal, and all other kinds of crazy stuff that are just headaches.
Trades
$BLU
The I/O was high on this one and I was a bit too early. The volume seemed like it was ripe for the taking, but I didn’t wait for confirmation and ended up hitting a max loss per ticker on this one.
$VERU
Man, what a nice setup. It wasn’t the A++ that I was hoping as the volume on the push wasn’t as high as I would have liked, so I ended up taking some pretty small size and covering too soon. I was really hoping we’d at least get a retest of the 6.90 level on volume, but it just never came.
$PTPI
I knew I was going to be a bit early on this one, so I took a 1/2R position and once it didn’t work out I decided to wait for a retest of the High (4.10) and just never got back to it. Overall had a good read post open.
$ESSC
Honestly I shouldn’t have really been in this one. The spread was interesting and it was thin as all get-out. The crazy part here is that I was up a solid 3-4R at one point, but my goal was 7R, so so I covered for small losses each time.
Sometimes you win and sometimes you don’t. Here I’m happy that I followed my process.
$SGMA
This one is a bit tough to look at. It was in a halt resume, so I took a 1/2R position vs the 17.29 level and DAS decided to freeze up randomly while I was watching the chart trying to figure out what was going on…then all of a sudden I hear that I got filled from my alerts. I then realized that something was up, so I had to run off to restart my charts and by the time I got back the main move was basically over with and I missed the re-entry for a glorious 10R setup.
Stuff happens though and there will be more where this came from, so I’m not tripping.