My first day since last fall that I traded exclusively my live-account. I didn't even log into the paper-trade account. Overall, it went well. Nine trades, seven winners traded mostly off extremes in volume and diversion from the mean as the trade trigger. My two losses were scratch trades, the first one as a malfunction in the trading platform. I clicked to place the trade and a precautionary window came up, something which hadn't happened on any of the earlier trades. I took the trade anyway but thought better of it when I saw that IB had made the short for only 9 trades instead of the preset lot of 250. Loss of 36 cents plus the 2 dollar commission! Ha. I have no idea what happened because I made no adjustments to the platform!....?????? I spent some time trying to figure it out but really couldn't. The next trade went through fine. Set up a live-chat with IB but got no response once the chat window came up. Left them a poor grade on the customer service screen assoc with the chat then moved on. Second loss was a scratch, loss of 92 cents, while lightening my position in the final trade. I had ignored my stop-loss and been down a couple hundred dollars so when my position went green, i cut it by 33%. Should have stuck with it on the other 2/3 of the position but I sold it moments later for a gain. The gain would have been very nice had I held. Once again, that was the story of the day for me. I really need practice letting winners run. I left much $ on the table.
First winner of the day and biggest gainer was a small-dollar stock which I picked up off the IB pre-leaders board, a list I once watched closely when I participated in the old GOTS chat. It was fun to have a look at them again. There's no doubt that opportunity is hidden in the "gutter."
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7 for 9 winners, a 78% success rate. Gain of $127.77 in 6.5 hours of live-trading
I'm starting to switch to more of a contrarian strategy like what you do. I'm much more consistent when I short large price spikes (whether intraday or multiday Sykes style) versus going long with the trend. I will still go long sometimes but only on certain breakout setups
ReplyDeleteYngvai,
ReplyDeleteAlso consider going long after a downtrend, provided the same entry signal of a large volume spike is present (consider also the distance from te mean). It's the same signal with comparable results both long and short. The 3-minute chart seems to give me the best results on the entry then the 5-minute to manage the trade. I've found that there is a small percentage of "false-positives" to the volume spike method of entry. Further, that spike can often be followed by increasingly LARGER spikes in a substantial move in one direction and as such, can fool you into thinking the reversal is imminent. Employ your stops...