July 26th - later trade

Ok, I did break away from the computer but my plans changed for the afternoon so I was able to sit in on the markets later in the afternoon. I was watching the recent pop in GENZ and thought there was enough volatility to do some momentum practice trading. I was fooled into shorting the 2:10 & 2:15 near-doji's and saw my trade go awry. Geez, I sure have to learn to get out of these things instead of watching where they go. Stops are my weakest skill. I am not ready to trade real money until I can confront this short-coming.

The spike of the 2:20 candle gave me a chance to pound this paper-trade aggressively... by adding three more shorts close to the top of the move; anticipating a strong drop. As expected, the drop came right away and I scaled out my position for a gain. And yes, out too soon again.

July 26th

I was able to take the morning to look at MON and try some practice trading. It was marked by right idea, shoddy execution. The big runup in the stock since afternoon last Thursday indicated to me that some profit-taking was coming. I thought that it would happen a bit earlier today and shorted the first breakdown of the day. That was a bad idea as I basically went short at the reversal point, picking the worst price of the move to do it. Bad execution. The morning price peaked at the 10:15 (?)doji and began to drop... not a lot of volume today so one of my indicators was not as helpful as it normally can be. As price popped at 10:30-10:45, I continued to hold short and then another drop toward the LOD. I saw the doji at 11:05 but then saw also the near doji that followed so I thought the breakdown was at hand. I shorted another 1000 shares about two cents from the original entry. And... another fakeout! Up it went on a great green candle. I held in anticipation that my gut feeling was right; a profit taking was coming in Mosaic. It then began to happen, albeit slowly. I dumped half at roughly breakeven then held the remainder, dumping it for a gain a couple minutes later.

As I mentioned before, good idea, poor execution.

Now done for the day. I am excited to see how things end for the day when I log in this evening...