June 4th

Logged into the market around 11:15 am and stayed until the end, although the last hour was a maze of distractions. The markets still appear sluggish to me based on where they were a couple months ago but as I've noted before, this appears to be the new norm. I paid attention to my stops today and looked for some trending opportunities as I paper-traded SKF, V, and AAPL. I'm still in the process of creating a format to measure how much of a trend I am able to capture... Also trying to pay close attention to how price and volume behave in the stock I am playing and how the indices act as the trend grinds to a halt and pullbacks/reversals take hold. This is where most of my skills need to develop, I believe. I am not nearly an expert at entries but I feel reasonably comfortable getting into a stock. Staying in is problematic and as I've mentioned before, I think it is the inability to competently identify exit points. It is my goal to initially take 60% of the move I'm playing. That gives me 20% fudge factor on the entry and 20% on the exit. I'll try to refine the record keeping as time goes on to reflect which moves I should be grading myself on... Ultimately it is my goal to trade into the longer moves of the day and not be so frenetic that I get out during the shortest of pullbacks. I'd like to develop the skill and patience to stay with good trends until serious reversals take place on the trade I'm in. Time will tell how it works out for me. Rather than measure my success in dollars, I want to try to measure success in the quality of my entry and exit points. Good execution will eventually lead to good gains. I'll measure my progress in how much of the trend I increasingly can take as a percentage of the entire move (80% would be nice) and rate it also by my ability to control over-trading. The successful traders who I've followed seem to trade 5-min candles. I'll focus on that even more. I still like the 3-minute chart but I will try to favor the 5-minute. Less information overload may help smooth out the little "bumps" (minor highs and lows) of an extended trend and keep me from jumping in and out too much. Again, we'll see how that goes for me. Right now, I'm still trying to train myself not to trade by fading extremes in momentum. I just love to trade the those quick changes of direction on a trend. However, it only serves me well if the change of direction is a true reversal (I do get some great entries on longer trends in some cases)... BUT... It is dangerous if it happens to only be a small pullback in a strong trend and I don't exit well. Further, the gains tend to be small because the pullbacks in a big move are small.
To make trading a career, I really have to train myself to trade with the momo, not fade it. Fading it is too often a suckers bet to risk my financial health on it.
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9 for 12 winners, a 75% success rate. Gain of $456 in 4.75 hours of trading.