Quitting early today as I have a number of errands to which I must attend. Did 17 paper-trades into 8 positions on SKF, all for winners. Mostly fading strong market sentiment for reversals and trying to hold onto the trend as long as I could. For the most part, I did pretty well in taking a substantive portion of the move I happened to be in, although I had a couple where I covered much too early, one just as one of the most decisive trends of the day was starting; great entry but missed an overwhelming portion of the drop between 10:15 am and 11:05am. Overall, I am satisfied with my performance today, although I must continue to try to sharpen my entry and exit points... especially my exits. This will add to my comfort level while in a trade. Many of my entries and exits are noted on the chart.
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8 for 8, a 100% success rate. Gain of $2995 in 5 hours of paper-trading.
Looks like you've got SKF down. Why not trade it with real money?
ReplyDeleteThanks for checking in, Ace. I'm still in my training phase... learning how to trade a trend rather than just scalping reversals. I have a reasonable record paper-trading ETF's as well as some stocks but being good at this is much like batting .400 in little league. Good practice but really doesn't mean much. In addition to training myself to effectively trade trends by sharpening my skills at identifying the ends of trends, I am just awakening to the ideas put forth by Mark Douglas in "Trading in the Zone." So, I am also still training my mind. I feel like I am much closer to real-money trading than I was two months ago and certainly when I adopted the idea that I could be a day-trader in October last year. I am sticking with paper-trading until I feel comfortable that I can perform all aspects of it with some degree of success, or until my personal financial situation requires a change.
ReplyDeleteAs perspective, I have been actively paper-trading since mid-January; about 4 1/2 months. It takes two years to get a Masters Degree, four years for a Bachelors. At age 43, I have 22 years until standard retirement. An extra month or two or three is not too long to wait in that context.