It’s been a while since I’ve done this, so I’m going to just dump some stuff before I get into todays trades and missed opportunities. I just looked back and realized the last time I blogged was towards the end of March. A bunch has happened since then. I took a few decent shots back in January that kind of put me sideways for a good while. I didn’t blow up and never was close to losing my account, but mentally it definitely took a toll. While it was a disturbing experience I truly believe that it was necessary, because it was through those experiences that I was able to refine myself further. The fact of the matter is, is that if you read about any of the greats and their stories you will find that they ALL have had setbacks. This time of setback is the make it or break it. It’s what’s separates the mice from the men. Do you use this to grow or do you whimper behind excuses and continue down a path of self pity.
As for me, I’m going to chose to use all of my experiences to grow. There is SO much opportunity out there to learn from (even the negative things) that there isn’t time to complain. There’s too much to learn and not enough time, so off to work we go!
During this time I also decided to go back and look at what I was doing and to my dismay I realized that the process that I thought I had wasn’t near as sound as I thought. Yes I had some basic criteria that you get from any random google search and yeah I know how to dip into some SEC filings (which honestly you don’t HAVE to do), but what I realized is that in terms of a wholistic model I was missing some key elements to give more confidence to get the job done. I spent a BUNCH of time reading through old @Team3dstocks tweets and in conjunction with data from @Spikeet I was able to create some tools to help answer a couple of key things for my setups. WHAT, WHY, and WHEN.
In the past I may have know the what and possibly the why, but the WHEN…..the when is key. There were SOOOOOO many times when I was jut too early, or I was upside-down for a GRIP because my understanding of the setup wasn’t sound. Having the right idea means nothing if you can’t execute. It’s funny how you can look back and see how you THOUGHT you knew the ins and outs of what you were doing, but once you put in the work you can clearly look back and understand that your edge wasn’t really an edge.
On top of all of this my position sizing was WAAAAYYY out of whack. I was getting comfortable making some gains and kept pushing the envelop, but the couple of trades that caught me , got me with WAAAYAY to much size on the bottom of the move and I got swiped a couple of bucks on size……talk about demoralizing. So I spent a TON of time working on my risk management system. I spent a bunch of time going through @BrianleeTrades tweets and even bought his R compounding excel sheet because I knew that this was going to be the main thing that would break me if I didn’t get it under control. To solve this sizing issue I modified a hotkey script for DAS trader that I found on bear bull traders for equalized risk using the inputs from @BrianLeeTrades R compounding approach. The end result is a hot key which will automatically size my positions for me vs a EXIT price so that My risk is automatically generated based on my account side FOR me. The key here is that I am thinking about EXIT first. I MUST have proper trade criteria to enter a trade. I also have max loss per tickers and daily max loss set with my broker (also based on the R compounding approach from @BrianLeeTrades).
Needless to say I have a renewed energy for trading. I am more confidence in what, why, and when. Combined with the proper risk management I can focus on the main thing , which is finding a proper exit and entry before I jump into a trade. This lets me LET THE TRAEDE WORK and keep my grubby paws out of chopping myself up.
Another thing that I did was work to cut out the noise. Some people just aren’t good for your mental space for WHATEVER reason it is. Some aren’t good for you because you admire them too much and let any thing they say sway you from your original plan or you just find yourself in a negative mindset because of what you allow to enter your mental space. For me it has been critical to clean up that space, follow and give space to those that bring positivity, growth, and positive challenge to your life and remove those things that lessen your experience.
I could go on and on, but I’m really excited about what I’ve been developing and I continue to look forward to more growth.
OK, onto todays trades.
I’ve decided that for continued improvement I’m going to breakup my trades into two sections. Trades and Missed trades. I want to focus on how/why I missed certain setups and what I can do to mitigate that.
Trades
The name of the game today was PATIENCE. After all that digging I have very specific setups that I look for and the power is in my court to WAIT for that setup, and that’s what I had great success doing today. Not every single trade was green (on the day I had a 50% success rate), but because of proper risk management i was able to recover and more than overcome the hits. This is a testament to proper trade selection and risk management. One cool thing is that with this system I was rewarded with more potential returns if I WAIT for a proper setup vs a risk level opposed to chasing. I’d much rather wait for the higher probability and more profitable scenarios. This has definitely been eye opening in regards to proper sizing vs risk ( I was NEVER near where I needed to be in the past).
$CPIX
I’m honestly not disappointed at this trade at all. My first entry was AFTER the high volume stuff against the key level, so I set my stop a little bit over it and unfortunately caught like .08 of slippage on the exit, but that’s the name of the game. It’s what happens. You see a setup and you take the trade with proper risk in place. My stops were in place and I lived to trade when it came back for another nice setup. Risk was tight and I executed. The one thing could have ben better here was wait for the 4.30’s to cover any of it. I think that being red had a part to do with me wanting to cover it as it flushed out, but I should be waiting for my levels and sticking to that. I ended this trade green and I’m grateful for not trying to turn this into something that it wasn’t.
One key takeaway was that with an 8 milly float and so much volume churning you never know WHO/WHAT has control of the float. The rotation on this thing was NUTS, so instead of trying to make this a patience play I took it for what it was….a trade into key levels and then moved on. Needless to say this bad boy came back in the afternoon like a mad man, and that’s why I don’t want to get too comfortable in a setup like this. Take it for waht it is and move on (at least for me) as I have 0 interest of battling all day long and getting stressed out.
$IMGN
I REALLY wanted to see this one push towards 6.90’s closer to the open, but it just never gave any change, so patience was the name of the game. My levels weren’t defined well enough here on my first entry, so I kept my risk VERY close (like 1/3R). Looking back at this I shouldn’t have been in on that first push and should’ve waited for where I entered the at the second VWAP rejection.
Overall that first was a tiny scratch and my second trade was what I was really looking for. Very tight risk off the entry and a 4R return right into a key level. One thing that I need to do is work on continuing to work the trend if it’s in my favor, so I made this small example on IMGN where given prior price action I could’ve added some of my covers back for a potential next move.
Missed Trades
This section definitely bothers me today. My job is to identify and participate in these setups and here I am writing about how I missed them. Frustrating as to what could’ve been, but there’s nothing that I can do about it except look for what I can do better and take those learnings into tomorrow.
$AHPI
I still can’t believe I missed this. Seriously look at that RANGE. 8.25 was the level to watch and we had 2pts of stressfree downside. I mean I REALLY missed this one.
$PPSI
I missed this one (even though I was watching it) because the borrow costs just had me like “nahhhh fam”. I’m still not sure if I’ll jump in and take that expensive of a borrow (because it makes me feel like I HAVE to trade it and that for me can lead to overtrading, so it’s a fine balance that I need to figure out on those pricey borrows.