April 1st

When I used to play golf, I would struggle to break 90. I loved the game but I was never able to conquer it. The old joke was that most times out, "I got my moneys worth" from the round because I would get to walk a lot...back and forth across the course chasing my ball! Well, that's the best analogy I could come up with for todays paper-trading. I felt like I struggled back and forth all day. The thing is, as I look at the trade recap, it looks pretty good. Why then do I feel like I just walked ten miles on the golf course? It's because I felt as though I was playing catch-up all day. First, I started with a loss. Next, my third trade was another bruiser although not as bad as yesterday's. Boom, after that trade, I was down $1.16 per share. And from there, while the tape looks pretty good, it was a mish-mash of scrambling to get my gains from each trade; often lacking confidence that I had a good entry. And, on the trades where I later learned I did have decent entries, I had bailed on some nice moves! I really think that except for the one bad trade early, my anguish was mostly because I was not riding my winners in a way that would have allowed a quick recovery of the big loss. For example, my 12:56 pm short on SRS at $54.58. This was as near to picking the top of a major daily turn of a stock as possible. Yet, I sold at 12:57 pm with a 6 cent gain. The shortest-term bottom following my exit was at $53.88 about 3 minutes later for what would have been up to a seventy cent gain. The bottom of the longer-term major move was at $52.05, a full $2.53 per share move from original short. Truly, I would not have held that whole move. But, this illustrates the reason why I had a "blue collar" hard work day at my desk! And this is just one of many examples of early entries on decent moves of that I jumped out of. The last trade of the day was a first for me. I quadrupled down on a reversal off that monster move in the market around 3:30 to 3:45. I was so sure that this was a winner; a power move which had to reverse! Again though, I took only a fraction (20 cents) of the $4.40 per share gains available to me on it (because it was 4x of a $1.10 per share move). I predicted the move but got only 5% of it! Sometimes, I really make things more complicated than they have to be. Phew, what a day. I'm going to the fridge for a Bass Ale.
19 for 24, for a 79% win rate; 99 cents gain.