iBankCoin
I turn dials and fiddle with knobs to hone in on harmonic rotations
Joined Oct 26, 2011
4,121 Blog Posts

Let Me ‘Splain It To You

Yesterday’s work has been paying dividends this week as it seems keeping my nose to the grindstone has yielded some positive results.  I have five positions up over 10 percent today.  I had six, but I booted the rest of my KNDI shares this afternoon.

My book is concentrating down very lovely.  I currently have 18 positions, but in reality I have only a few.  Let me explain:

LED Stocks – RVLT, CREE, LEDS, and OESX

Weed stocks – HEMP, PHOT, and GRNH

Everything else stocks – TSLA, LO, ONVO, VJET, TWTR, CUDA, and EXK

Call options – BBRY, ANGI, VJET, Z, and newly minted SINA

Yep, I went out and bought one of the lousiest losers on the day, SINA, when I SHOULD have simply waited.  This SINA daily chart is ugly.  I had to accept that.  The weekly chart is a beauty fit for a king.  I went ahead and bought in near the end of day, tossing caution to the wind—something I may regret if this stock doesn’t turn on a dime.

I think there is tilt from losing, and tilt from winning.  The latter is overconfidence, and it took some overconfidence to buy that SINA chart.  Maybe Dougie Fresh Kass will exact some vengeance upon my person for poking him all afternoon. He could go ravage SINA for a few days with short sales. I don’t know he’s on tilt too, you see?

Fortunately, I have lots of cash on hand after a few days of opportunity, 25% cash.  That is a ton of cash.

I sold FSLR to avoid another earning gash.  It looks like it was the right move.  It helped that the stock has a 17% win rate over the last 18 calls.  It will be interesting to see if this guy comes back tomorrow.  If it does, then it could rip all quarter.

What can I say?  I was bitter when I missed the TSLA run from $40 to $160 because I loved the concept back then.  I was not about to make the same mistake twice when the market gifted me with $120.00 entry points.  Haven’t you figured investing out yet?  It’s a god damn popularity contest, just like you hated in high school.  Remember when the dorks weren’t cool?  Then they invented social media companies and the cheerleaders flooded your halls with ticker tape and suddenly said dorks were heading the pep rally?  LoL, welcome back to high school, now who is going to take one for the team and bring ANGI to the dance?

Seriously, investing, like politics, is a popularity contest.  You can hate it all you want, or you can seek out the popular and leech onto them for their scraps.  Raul, being shameless, chooses the latter.

Don’t go goth on me and start shorting TSLA.  If you do, have some couth and be clever, else be ousted by the masses.

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Took My First Scale in $KNDI

I took my first scale in this $KNDI long, up over 25% in a mere week.  It wasn’t a graceful scale, as price continues to rip higher.  Nevertheless, I was captured on film:

http://youtu.be/LI8x94EVQ7E

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Precarious Potential Opening Position

The futures drifted lower last night, after some selling took hold late into yesterday’s afternoon session.  The action was balanced, and featured a proper auctioning of price before finally determining a drift lower was in order.

The move pressed us down into the single TPO prints from yesterday which means we are opening in range/out of value verses yesterday’s trade which elevates the risk/reward for today’s session.  I have a rule that will not let me trade inside of single prints unless I am going with the short term trend, which in this case is down.

I have drawn a potential scenario for today, where I expect us to run the zipper down and test the value area high at 3670.50.  Should this occur, we may see a balance ensue.  If we continue lower without responsive buying, our next levels are the VPOC and eventually the value area low at 3662.75.  These observations can be seen on the following NASDAQ market profile chart:

NQ__MarketProfile_02252014

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Milking The Drake Trade

Quite the transposition of events, recently, what with WhatsApp fetching a cool $19 billion and Olympics coming to an end.  Now a speculator who survived earning’s season must decide how they will make money for the next three months.

Pro tip: take it one day at a time, like an alcoholic.

Many of my positions are charging higher today.  This new high on the NASDAQ composite is acting like a real new high by causing our favorite hot money stocks to run aggressively.  It may be prudent to take some profits here, or even to look for an opportune short given the extended nature of the marketplace.

But with all the new money being blown on go-carts and quad racers in CHINA, who am I to scale profits in KNDI?  Here’s the KNDI kicker—they build electric cars, and electric cars are hot.  You know what isn’t hot?  Exposing yourself to the putrid smog of China.  They will make a strong push into electric cars, citing the smog, not realizing that most of the energy is coal generated.  Meanwhile, they will keep burning old mattresses out back of their shops, near the local water source.  Given the kickass manner in which new money behaves, I bought MORE SHARES of KNDI today.  It now represents my second largest equity position.

Meanwhile in the crisp air of CANADA buddy, their flagship phone company BLACKBERRY is being chopped into little bits of proprietary software and user interfaces which are being parlayed into new applications using OTHER peoples hardware.  Can you say, “that’s exactly what the Drake executives at BBRY need to focus on?”  Because it is.  And they are.  I am inclined to buy more, but the intrinsic value of my current holding is nearly 3x what I would hold in equity.  I will add on weakness, slowly, because I am in a position of strength.  AND I WILL NEED it, facing a strong competitor in delmur and his March Madness pick SZYM which had a nice look going into the tournament and is providing adequate chase to still win this week.

I also bought some HEMP.  This is added to my basket of degeneracy with PHOT and GRNH.

Other highlights on my day include CUDA.  With all the network compromise happening today, and the big push to a paperless internet existence, how aren’t you investing in security?  You should be, both in real life, and via an investment/trade.

I don’t own any Facebook because I was scared away by a viral youtube video.  There is some irony baked into this, but I lack the sense of humor to locate it.

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Morning NASDAQ Trader Report

There has been solid overall auction activity overnight where we are seeing constructive action from both the buyer and the seller.  Late into trading Friday the sellers rejected the uppermost distribution we were forming.  Their action could be seen as a swift vertical movement lower followed by an hour of “acceptance” of the new prices via sustaining the levels.  Once the futures opened back up for business, we gave the area a solid auction lower, found a bid, and pressed above where we are currently finding selling.  The net activity forms a nearly symmetrical distribution of time and volume.

The profile however, does appear to have a slight imbalance which sellers could capitalize on early this morning.  It appears to be contingent upon how we handle 3674.50 early on, a value area low and sight of prior responsive selling.  If we again find sellers here in the early USA hours, we may see an attempt to balance out our current profile by trading down below the volume shelf at 3664.25.

Of course, if sellers are unable to respond at 3674.50, then we may see another drive for fresh highs.  Also, if sellers cannot push us over the volume shelf to balance out our current profile, then we would gain a valuable bit of insight, that buying force is great enough to disrupt the natural tendency of Gaussian distribution.

In the short term, I give sellers a slight edge in control.  This is void if they do not show responsive trading at 3674.50.  This short term control by sellers firms up if they push us below the shelf at 3674.50.

Intermediate term, we are in balance.  I have highlighted this balance and a few key levels on the following micro composite profile, spanning about 6.5 days of trading activity:

NQ_VolumeProfile_intermediateTerm_LateFeb2014

Long term, buyers are in control.  This can be seen as a series of higher highs and lows on the daily and weekly COMPQ chart.

Below is my vision for the morning, where I have highlighted the key price point and a scenario for the session using my market profile chart:

NQ_MarketProfile_02242014

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Big Move Making

Pardon my absence from the social web of internet traders.  You must know, good people, you are some of the finest entities I have ever met.  The fact of the matter is sometimes duty calls.  As much as I would love nothing more than to be a full time trader, clicking buttons and talking smack on the internets, I also go into the real world, real time, and aggressively hunt down opportunity to make money.

You are all witness to a major life transition for me and you do not even know it.  Well, I will tell you because it is big—no HUGE.  I am done, I am done being a corporate butt in a seat.  Instead I will venture out into the real world and make real money making real moves while shaking dice and pumping iron.

I am short of words.  I did not use sleep last night, instead opting to work through the night like any ambitious go getter who had a big old floppy fish jump in their boat.  The fish are jumping in the boat PEOPLE.

I checked in with the market, briefly this morning.  Only long enough to get in the way of the good work I had done a month ago.  I remote connected to my mothership to see ACAD in the green, after the options were 80% worthless only one day prior.  Impressed by my now 30% gain, I booked and cooked.  Later I come to see I left nearly $3.00 in premium on the table aka several stacks of Benjamins.  I pretty much sold everything too soon this week.  I am done selling.  No more selling until May right?  Sell IN MAY, go do something like a richer.

My algo is so slow to develop.  I get close, and then I get far, but I continue to fiddle with the dials on my quest to hone in on harmonic rotations.  This next iteration of Elroi is going to knock the socks, that much I know.

Top picks, into next week: RVLT, CUDA, and the Drake trade aka BBRY.

PS, I am a few basis point away from being back to black on the year.  GOOD ENOUGH, here you go:

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High Demand Price Points

Equity futures are slightly up overnight, snapping the consistent seller control the globex hours have experienced all week.  This presents us with conditions this morning which are different from all the prior days in this holiday shortened week.

As the USA comes online, prices are right in the middle of a balanced price distribution.  There does not appear to be any sort of imbalance in the short term for us to envision scenarios upon.

The buyers are in control of the short timeframe.  They were successful in defending us against the “slip zone” yesterday by exhibiting the same type of aggressive demand at these levels as we had seen during the first go at prices.  It’s slightly odd, because the profile we were printing yesterday premarket has an imbalanced look—and to complete the distribution would have put us well into the slip zone.  This could have started a liquidation trade.

This is an interesting clue, because it signals the buyers were acting with enough haste and force to disrupt the natural process of distribution.  By doing do, they claimed control of the short term timeframe.

The intermediate term timeframe is balance.  Until we see a higher high, we are in a balancing zone where mean revision is likely.  The long term control is in buyers hands.

We could get a sense of buyer sentiment by testing lower today to see if demand still exists at key prices like 3667.50 where we printed a low volume node on a surge of orders.  Should we test this level, and not find the same amount of buyer participation, we may continue to test lower to the VPOC at 3665.75 and our value area low at 3655.  I have highlighted these levels and a few other observations on the following market profile chart:

NQ__MarketProfile_02212014

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Pressing Longs

So I lost my parlor bets on GRPN, options I bought on a deal yesterday afternoon when the going was tough.  A winner would have been a pleasant cash infusion, parlayed into helper robots and what have you.  I am chopping wood over here, aggressively going in circles with my account, making little progress toward positive ROI.

Which would be fine if I was mostly in the cash, but I am -2% on the year while being a minimum of 90% long and often with levered option instruments.  By George, if I didn’t know a little bit over here, I would likely be -10% ALREADY.

Chalk it up to the old learning grid.  We are learning over here.

Tomorrow could still very well propel me into green territory.  I have some OWW calls which looked nice into the bell.  I also have a BIG MEECH long in RVLT, CREE, LEDS, and OESX—the LED quartet.  There are a few other longs on my books but it gets very boring to repeat the list.  I will show the highlight reel:

I scaled TSLA down to a modest, risk tolerable size before earnings, but still participated in the gap higher.  What a fantastic company and leader.  I will size back in on the dips.

I too have gone to my largest long state yet in ONVO.  I took a nice win on this stock late last year and have positioned to do so again.  There is a big retail component to this stock, which makes it interesting [read: cray cray].

Still rocking some EXK which is 24% greener then where I found it.  At this point, why sell?  I will give this name plenty of room to get noisy and perhaps continue being a beast.

I took a BBRY March call position.  I like the chart, not the company.  I will answer to the nickname “Drake” for the duration of this trade.  As you may know, 75% of males in Canada are named Drake.

Elroi is still in the shop.  I took a big stride in the wrong direction with my little guy and have since corrected course.  The testing continues.

That’s about it.  We’re up near the highs, trying to squeeze resilient shorts, and my book is grotesquely long and begging to be corrected.  Somehow, I still sleep like a little baby duck.

Nighty night, keep your OPEX tight! [returns to laboring on robots]

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Approaching The Slip Zone

We have been profiling sellers all week in the futures, sellers who have been especially active during the globex session.  It made sense to have an expectation for selling given the rapid ascent of the NASDAQ index and the unfinished auction business it left behind in its wake.

We have been observing a very balanced profile with a naked VPOC just below our recent trading activity.  It was a logical target for sellers and the auction process.  A throwback to the pricing allows the marketplace to assess the force that originally existed at these prices to determine if demand still exceeds supply forces.

When the news hit the wires about Facebook and purchasing What’s App we saw a quick move lower in the after hour session.  Since then, it has been a back-and-forth rotation with sellers in control of the short term timeframe.

I do not have a clear read on the intermediate term control.  I am attempting to see balance on the intermediate term, but I do not see it.  I see sellers somewhat having an edge, but only if they can press lower through today.  We are set to open near the slip zone, a set of single print TPOs from a very dynamic move higher.

Between us and the slip zone is the very low volume node at 3635.  Should this level breach, I will be looking for weakness to cut out of my book.

I have highlighted this level and a few other observations on the following market profile chart:

 

NQ__MarketProfile_021202014

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Bullish “Poor High” in Effect

The S&P 500 via its electronic futures contract the /ES printed a poor high on the session.  This refers to a high watermark printed as a double or even triple print.  It is very uncommon for such a print to mark swing high.  Given our recent swing high this morning, it lends a bit of confidence to being long…at least until a new high is made.

ES_MarketProfile_02192014

 

UPDATE: Also, reader Matt_Bear points to this chart, where he sees a pattern which may preclude higher prices:

MattB_spx2014-02-19-TOS_CHARTS

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