1 st trade of the day

First trade of the day was a stop out, in keeping with my pact to only exit on stop outs or anytime within the last 15 mins of the trading day. But, I REALLY wanted to exit on the downspike of the 11:35 red candle with the long lower wick. I mean, I REALLY wanted to exit with the 32 cent gain I had. My sense was that the long lower wicks on the candles in the downtrend I was playing indicated demand was strong and buyers were eating up shares from the 11:10 candle through the candle I in which I had the urge to exit. Long tails mean volatility. In volatile markets, one should take quicker profits when offered, in my opinion. Further, TNA is range bound so far... as I write this, 10 mins past my exit point, we are still in the trading range though price is pushing down toward the LOD where I had my urge to exit earlier. My gut feel is that lower is the likely scenario for the day. Frankly, if that happens, going short where I stopped out would have been the smart play, which also represents a pullback to the 17 EMA and also corresponds to the near-doji candle at 11:10 am.

OK, here we go lower... as I suspected. What this also means is that the move lower began only 8 cents higher than where I stopped out. I am not disheartened by this. I simply have to be sharper on tactics to reflect the correct strategic reading of momo.

One last thing about this early trade today is that I entered in the direction of the prevailing trend, which is against my natural impulse to play for reversals. I had to give it a moment of thought before doing it, and that pause says to me that this necessary mode of trading needs more practice. To my credit, I consciously waited for a pullback to enter, in this case, I waited until after the downspike had retreated leaving a long red wick; a satisfactory pullback point in which to enter short. One thing about price spikes (up or down) on volume is that they are high probablility indicators of reversal. The reversal did come causing me to stop out, but I also had a chance to take profits of over 30 cents before the reversal. And in volatile conditions, it makes sense to take quicker profits.

UPDATE: Since writing, correcting the typos, and posting this summary of my first trade, price did hit a new LOD as I mentioned above but then reversed after touching the S2 pivot and went up in 20 mins to touch the Pivot and is now pulling down away from the Pivot. For the time being, we are remaining range bound. Just like the old days before computers when floor traders used to use pivot points to guide them, they still are places of S & R.