RED day…..terrible. A heck of a way to bring back the public journaling. Judging by the crazy amount of snow and the fact that the snow plow managed to push so much snow by my mailbox that it snapped in half, should’ve let me know this was going to be an interesting day.
The biggest frustration about today is that I spent the weekend looking over the very setup that would bite me today. It definitely tells a story about me that I have to face and find ways to overcome my shortcomings, but we’ll get to that when we go over SCKT below. I have a BUNCH to go over on that one.
Overall my trading has been pretty good lately, however I’ve let about 4 names in the past 2 months really just break me up entirely too much. There’s 0 reason why I should have as many green days as I do and then let it get undone by a couple of days, so I’m looking to improve my current max loss setup with my broker. Right now it’s setup that I can’t add to a position once a certain number is hit, so that i can work out of the position, but clearly I can’t be trusted in these situations. I also need to look at the commonalities of these plays and come up with some rules.
After today I’m 100% onboard with never trading a low float/micro float on day1 of the move on the short side until we get a squeeze out and failed follow through and even when I see these setups they will not be an A+ type setup. These are supplemental setups as they carry a certain type of risk, which imho is better suited on the long side. I’m sure I’ll miss out on some plays, however I’m ok with missing those plays if it eliminates the stress. If there was some serious supply overhead then I might be ok with dabbling, but for now it’s just not my thing. This entire journey is about finding out what you’re good at and there are just some setups that are no beano for me. I wish there was a way to automate thoses params, so I wouldn’t even see them in my scans. I’ll see if there’s a way in ToS to program this in.
BNGO was a decent read for me. I kept risk in check and was able to stay in the trade because of it. I got the trade that i was prepared for, however I need to be a little bit more strict on my target entries. While I kept risk tight for my first entry I should’ve been looking for the bigger pop, which would have kept me out of the little bit of chop and ultimately meant more profits. While I’m happy that I kept the risk in check I want to be more demanding for my entries.
PLTR much like BNGO I was just a little too early on the first try. Granted it was with small size and i sized out for minor scratches I want to get involved at the top of a range, not in the middle or at the bottom. 29.60 and/or the 30 test should have been where I looked to get involved. Ultimately it all worked out, but I want to make sure that I’m not taking my self out of the trade by getting there too early.
Sheesh…where to begin. I would be lying if I didn’t say that after taking the haircut today that I didn’t feel like throwing in the towel. I had to take some time to cool off and remember who I was ( took a couple of hours and got a nice hand written note from my wife that brought me back to my senses). No my account isn’t blown up, but man I just hate making stupid mistakes. I’m better than that and I’ll chalk this up to a lesson about the need to stay focused. The mistrress “the market” doesn’t care what you have going on around you, she’s going to do what she wants and it’s up to you to get in line if you want to take her for a dance and not get your head taken off.
With this current market I think we have to stop calling these crazy events “black swans and we should start calling them brown squirrels, because it seems like you seem them on the daily nowadays.
I actually started out good on this trade, but where I failed was that I had a started position on around 8.50s and instead of taking off the whole thing I took off half of it, which ultimately led to me covering chunks in the 10s and 9s. Definitely not where I wanted to be, but not a deal breaking by any means however leading this position on had me “chasing” my average, so by the time I added some in the 12’s I was ok, but just wanted to get a bit “more” and me wanting to get more because of the range lead to me staying in the trade too long. Then when I was ready to finally size out because of the lower highs getting in I got distracted by someone at work (not their fault at all) and then it swiped, then swiped again and while waiting for a pullback that never came it just kept running.
I didn’t have crazy size, but crazy size doesn’t matter when something moves 7 points against you.
The moral of the story is that I need to be much more disciplined with taking all of my starter off instead of letting it work because I think i have a good average. I need to lock in my head that I’m taking it off because the setup doesn’t look right, so why would i want to leave just some on. Worst case scenario i that I can just get back in the trade, but have 0 stress. The 0 stress part is the biggest thing for me.