"A man is not finished when he is defeated. He is finished when he quits."

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

June 10th


I had the chance to get into the markets at 10:30 am and stay all day if I wanted to. However, I have some admin work for my day-job to attend to so I'm closing out the day at 2:15 pm.
Paper-traded three stocks today; POT, AAPL, & SKF. My POT and AAPL trades were examples of lost opportunity from selling too soon. I really gave away a lot of gains on the POT trade. I had an absolutely stellar entry at 11:18am long at $114.35. This was within 17 cents of the LOD! I sold 5 minutes later for a gain of $233. The price just kept rising however, finally topping out at $116.48 less than an hour later! I would have had up to a $2,130 gain had I held on. Oh, well. I will eventually get the hang of this. On my AAPL trade it was more of the same although I am giving myself a bit of a break because while the price went up another $770 beyond the $148 gain I had, the price did actually dip to what would have been minus $290 on the trade just 10 minutes or so after my entry (*see 11:15 am, 5-min candle); a price which would likely have scared me out of the trade... causing me to miss the eventual nice gain anyway.
Overall, I was happy to get the gains on the day but I certainly had much opportunity missed. One loss today in SKF was a stop out; too early on the reversal which eventually came at 1:45pm on the 5-min chart. I made up the loss on a short at the reversal (1:49 pm) and one more as the reversal picked up speed (2:10 pm). The last trade was one I made just to get me over the $1000 mark for the day; covered too soon but didn't care as it was just a "goal" trade to put me into the thousand dollar territory.
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8 for 9 winners, an 89 % win rate. Gain of $1,055 in 3.75 hours of paper-trading.