June 3rd

Closing it down early today because I have two day-job appointments beginning at 3:00 pm. Again my old favorite, SKF, was sluggish today. I picked up 3 trades on it as well as one small gainer on a PBR reversal. I watched my stops today and tried to stay with the trend I was in. Limited success at that. More on that later. I'm in the process of trying to adopt a format for measuring the % of a given trend I take as a gain. I think the best way to improve on something is to start measuring it. I think it will really draw my focus in on this problem of bailing out too early. The reasons I've mentioned before: a lack of confidence in my ability to recognize a slowing trend coupled with the thrill of putting up a "winner" on the board, even if it is for a paltry portion of the overall move in the stock I'm playing. I'd really like to make progress this month on correcting this difficulty I have.

Hope all had a profitable day; in money, knowledge, or both!

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4 for 4 winners, a 100% success rate. Gain of $233 in 3 hours of paper-trading.

June 2nd

My day of paper-trading was one where I could not focus solely on the stocks because of more pressing things related to the day-job. I have let many of my administrative tasks lapse in favor of the markets and today I tried to do both to get caught up. I didn't do too badly considering my broken attention. The SKF was not moving very much today... the day range and the momo was not great based on other days. I t sure has changed from the month of March when I was just getting into trading the ETF's. Of course, sustained volatility like that only comes around every so often. I have a feeling that trading in the future will resemble more of what we see now as opposed to then, or even less movement/volatility. September 2008 through March 2009 was very unusual, for sure. Today and probably days in the future are indicators that I may have to go back to searching for ADR stocks rather than just being able to count on certain ones to move every day. Not sure about that, but my gut tells me it might be that way. Relying on movement in the financials and their ETF's have made trading so much easier in that no scans or searches have been necessary. Just punch up the SKF, SRS, FAZ,FAS, etc and go to work! We'll just have to see what the future holds. I really don't have much experience in the quieter market times to compare to. I know one thing, I'd really like to see the VIX above forty for the rest of my trading life! As for today, I had some good entries and I seemed to gauge direction fairly well. I just didn't stay with my trades long enough. Same old issue for me. I'm at the point where I'm ready to just take the chance that all my trades might stop out rather than take quick gains. It seems that many of the trades, if I were to let the trend develop, would offset the losers I would take getting stopped out on the trades where I normally take quick gains. I'm going to take a closer look at todays exits and measure them against the eventual reversal to see how much I gave up today. I'll post it if it is noteworthy.

7 for 7 winners, a 100% success rate. Gain of $366 in 4 hours of "inattentive" trading.

June 1st

Friday's open postions went from bad to worse... I simply closed them out when I got back to the office. The experiment to see what my broker would do to sell positions from my

account when exceeding margin and by how much wasn't even successful as IB did not liquidate any more shares after the two small forced sales on Friday. I did get an email from them however, but nothing more. So, it was a bust all around as a learning tool. So, I'm starting the month off on a losing note but it is all for education. Needless to say, I would not have let this happen with real money. I had a chance to make a few small trades after clearing my account of the open SKF and GS. All three for winners with a gain of $323 on them. Those aren't going to show up very well against the -$13,534 loss... Ha!

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3 for 5 winners; a 60% success rate. Down -$13,211 in 30 mins of trading (closed open positions)