The words sound sweet to my ears. The glow they produce, so versatile and clean. The energy they consume, so small. LEDs are the TSLA of the lighting industry.
So sure, you could for the same price purchase a decent European luxury car and live in the present. Or you can buy the TSLA Model S and leap into the future. You could outfit your home and workplace with CFLs, ugly little pig tail looking devices. Or grab some soft glow LEDs at your local Home Depot, direct from CREE.
Also politicians, I know you read the Raul blog and I also know you want to save the world, why not outfit your municipal streets with the XSPR street light at only $99 a piece? Seems like a no brainer.
And if you want to just sit back and let the pros do all the work, why not pick up your phone and call the fine folks at RVLT? They will be happy to retrofit your business.
Save the world, join us in the future, live the LED lifestyle.
Note: CREE and RVLT are my largest two positions. I intend to buy more and concentrate my wealth further into this industry. This is the big one chapos.
Note Two: I sold AIXG. The Germans are failing at the LED game, oddly enough.
For most of my tenure as a trader stocks have been treated like a singular asset class and thus tightly correlated to other macro instruments like bonds, the US dollar, gold, and oil. The binary nature drove me to studying futures because if all stocks were hell-bent on moving as one, I might as well trade them all simultaneously with an ass load of leverage.
I love the futures markets. They are pure order flow with no dependence on a company and their decisions. But seeing good companies and more importantly good charts succeed even while the market chops around is exciting.
It makes me want to concentrate more funds into stock trading.
I got caught on the wrong side (the long side) of the quick drop this morning. Even though I preach plan adherence, I deviated and had to take a ton of heat on my trade. The poor entry, paired with a non-market related event which shall not be mentioned but which has officially created a rule, caused me to shake out of my long—I shit you not—one tick off the morning swing low (about 11am). No less than five minutes later, what I had expected—a bit of a bounce to cut my loss into—occurred.
This was a huge setback to my futures trading, huge. I am so sick of setbacks incurred from plan deviation. They are huge drains on emotional capital.
I went and had some tacos with a friend. We talked about hunting mushrooms and it was quite the stimulating conversation and helped clear my mind to assess everything. Trading structure will be restored for tomorrow’s action and it is good to make these mistakes while trading small, believe me.
Focusing so much energy on work and trading futures allows me to think much more slowly about stocks. The more I learn from the excellent traders and stock pickers here at iBankCoin the better this approach feels. My book is up 2.5% today while the Big Board chops the UNCH.
RVLT is a big part of the green portfolio, but it is getting plenty of help from IMMR, MHR, YGE, BALT, and FB. My account is straight crack rock and ripping.
I see a huge consolidation occurring, as if we are waiting for news flow to get this party started. Bull or bear, a party is near—I can hear the bass rumbles in the distance. Until this decision is clearly made, I will hold the line, 90% long.
My slow money is in AIXG, LO, RVLT, MJNA, FB, O, F, and CREE
My fast money is in AMBA, IMMR, MHR, YGE, BALT, RBCN, and CLF
I still hold a sharp edge in the futures market and my win/loss ratio shows it. The p/l however does not yet because of setbacks. This isn’t over until I win which is simply a matter of time, not if. This week however, my stock gains are casting a bright glow on my futures losses.
Pro Tip: Like any business, be sure you are sufficiently capitalized. Better yet, have other revenue streams so this learning process doesn’t come with the added stress of keeping a roof over your head.
Blocking out the news flow is difficult but the blissful ignorance that comes from it is worth the effort. Remember if something is important, my well curated twitter stream will tell me. Better yet, the professionals inhabiting the many rooms of iBankCoin will tell me. Anything local will be filtered to me via family, colleagues, and friends. This frees my mind to focus on order flow and sustaining and growing my revenues.
Some days however, often after eating too heavy of a lunch, my attention span degrades by the minute. For that reason I mostly do not trade futures in the afternoon. Instead I usually read, stare out the window, or look at Tina Fey nip slip pics. Nip slips always get my a.d.d. all worked up.
Anyhow, today I closed green by 1.25% even though I was up a rock star 3% intraday. I scaled off a bit of YGE. I could afford to do so because I timed my entry perfectly. The market provided me 7% gains, you see, by the time we reached swing high. I will book that bread any day of the week. I now have a lower cost basis and as close to a risk free trade as you can get in the markets.
How about that AMBA? I couldn’t be happier about tossing my Zillow shares in the dumpster to fund my AMBA purchase. The old me would still be in Zillow. The dead fish action would result in me drawing faces on lemons with a sharpie and then tossing said lemons into my Blendtec emotionlessly. The house would smell lovely as I died on the inside.
Zillow speaks to the selective nature of our market. ChessNwine has been keeping this thought at the forefront of our trading mindset in his Weekly Strategy Sessions. As a matter of fact, he brought my attention back to AMBA too. I mean, it never left my watch list, and I am a total GoPro fanboy, but the reminder was a nudge on the shoulder if you will.
This AMBA trade has taken conviction. I am glad to see mine coming back online.
Earlier I said this is all an appetizer, so you may be asking yourself, “What’s for dinner?” Well my friends, LEDs are for dinner…and sloppy joes. 2013 is the year of the LED, they simply took the 3rd quarter off. I have been financing these sleepy laggards with high level SHOMPPERY and 12631 magnificence, but it is high time they come online. My top picks into the fourth quarter are CREE, RVLT, OESX, LYTS, RBCN, VECO, GTAT, and AIXG.
I like CREE the best as a company, RVLT the best as a young man’s speculative investment, and AIXG for their Germanic tribal nature. I am long the trinity and will buy more of both after I spank a few more trades for stand up doubles.
I joined Le Doctour in BALT today. I really just like the chart picture, you know me. He does all the macro stuff.
Everyone is complaining about the way /ES traded today, but I had one of my better days. When you have an idea of the context we are in, bobbing along the bottom with no conviction, you know to get the laser sight out and get damn good entries to allow you to get out before the things stalls and reverses. We are learning over here and making a little bit of money while we do so. From the high win rate comes larger position sizing and eventually scaling. Then we make the big bucks.
Ah yes, I nearly forgot the point of this post—Everything you see is fake. The dog and pony show in Washington over Obamacare and debt ceilings is all fake, jack ass es. Do you really think any of this really matters, really? I does not. The terror threat elevation right at about 3:50pm? Yes, fake. Syria, real and sad, but so is every third world where cavemen kill each other for the best poppy fields. Making noise about them is fake. I have nightmares about a war on our land all the time because of these pundits and the terror threat bullshit. Even some nip slips are fake. I know, horrible times we live in..
Fear mongering from the glass half empty crowd is dangerous. Avoid the losers who can’t drop it.
There was an interesting occurrence this morning right before we printed the low of the day. Price traded down to the overnight lows and then completely stalled. This was right about when the POTUS took to the podium. Then, as I had suggested may occur, we breached the overnight (yesterday) low briefly, the flow of stop losses created a temporary oversold condition, buyers reacted to seeing the weak sellers and a sharp buying tail printed on the /ES market profile. We also snapped the following trend line lower, finally:
I bought the YGE full sized amidst all this. It was very lovely execution that brings a little sparkle to Raul’s eye.
The velocity of the move was enough to put plenty of shorts in the hole. It should make for an interesting afternoon as value is being set higher then I expected in my scenario 1 balance hypothesis.
With today’s YGE purchase, I am about 85% long, mostly crack rock stocks—stocks like CREE, RVLT, YGE, AMBA, MHR, FB, RBCN, and CLF.
Can you believe I am nearly up 100% on my FB common? I’m holding steady until at least $100.
The weak-to-strong closing type would be a change of character in the recent market activity and we may be looking at an inflection point. It is a bit early to tell, but I like my aggressive positioning here.
I intend to use my winnings to finance the purchase of a Tesla Model S, the greatest automobile currently in production.
We could get together around a campfire and complain about the stock assassins and their research. We could heat up a pot of baked beans while we jeer about the move in precious metals in the fifteen minutes leading up to the #NoTaper Fed announcement Wednesday. Then we could sleep next to each other on the dirt staring up at the cosmos and cursing algorithms.
But that’s all loser talk, and I only like small doses of nature.
Instead, let us focus directly on what we can do. Solutions if you will.
We can manage risk. MHR is a different approach to entering stocks, I bought weakness. Normally I enter alongside strength. Traditionally I would have MHR on my watch list like it was, but I would wait for pricing greater than the last two days to show strength and momentum. Then it would stall out like it did today and I would sit through a drawdown. That method still works for me, but I’m working on anticipating the move a step earlier. I could have already taken a profit in the name, but I am moving purposely slower on these stocks.
Zillow caught me off guard. I saw it break my range, but I prefer to give stocks the benefit of the doubt meaning let’s see where it closes. The volume profile below was very thin, we cut right through it. I did not cut my loss. Perhaps I will regret this but the stock behaved constructively after the panic abated. I have managed myself out of uglier head fakes, and I have fumbled losing trades. That experience helps. As it stands, I am -6.43 % on a 10% position size. Oh the humanity.
Zillow and CLF did however knock me off my high water mark. CLF has not done me wrong yet. Is the trade wrong? No, it is only taking heat. I will take my loss when it is wrong. I lost my vision on this trade for a bit, but RaginCajun reaffirmed my vision.
There is gap supply coming into CREE. You have to imagine all of those underwater folks are eager to cash in now that they are being made (partially) whole. I put some trading capital into this name that needs to be separately managed from my investment.
A trade like RBCN makes up for 3 or 4 losers, this has been a forgiving market for longs.
I was green trading the ES this week, holding my own through some big waves. This is the most exciting part of my week. I cannot wait to build upon it next week and also to review my trades over the weekend.
I shut El Roi off before the Fed and have not turned him back on since. I would imagine he is chomping at the bit to get his grubby algo hands back on the tape but first I must go through the ceremonial revamp of optimizing and chanting and such.
Overall I am just happy to be here, banking coin alongside some of the most insightful minds in trading. If you have any tickers of interest or general trading/algo questions ga’head, ask me…I will answer them as best I can.
The market has been unable to compel me into action today. Instead I have sat here drinking coffee and watching my peers rip the faces off of shorts with supreme ultra-violence. My goodness, RaginCajun extracts a solid win off of EGLE, passes the baton to Le Fly and here we are, winning the relay.
One of my twitter buds was all over the shippers move too, well done @Apoms24 on the DRYS.
The day after a huge move, overnight or RTH, tends to be tricky intraday. Therefore, I sat in the bleachers and enjoyed the view.
Book largest-to-smallest: CREE, RVLT, RBCN, AIXG, Z, MHR, FB, CLF, LO, F, IMMR, MJNA, and O
Cash: 20%
Tickers of interest: YGE, FSLR, ONVO, ZNGA, FRO, END, and GMCR
Pull up daily and 30 minute charts of EGLE, GMCR, ACTV, and END and you will see beautiful charts, tightly coiled and ready to make explosive moves. I want you to note I bought none of them.
I did however buy CREE and MHR taking my long exposure up to 75 percent. I have another 10 percent in SKF, leaving me 15 percent cash to navigate tomorrows FED day. That’s essentially why I did not buy anything else today. I like the stocks I mentioned in paragraph one. Any one of those could produce a big gainer.
Interestingly enough, after today’s CREE buy and pooling in RBCN, 40 percent of my book is committed to LED technology. RBCN has some action off the new iPhone home button too, but their sapphire is an important material in LED production. This is my very concentrated bet. Parts of it aren’t doing too well. Take RVLT for instance—the chart looks hellish, yep…technical term. And I’m -30% on the name. Don’t care. I mean, I care very much, but the stock is a long term speculative hold. AIXG cannot and will not break out of its consolidation range. My cost basis is the only thing keeping me in this play because if it wasn’t near the bottom of this range I would have a harder time stomaching these waves.
I took one trade in the /6E today. After /6e pushed lower, it pulled back to a place I could enter. The trade went in my favor, all the way to my target, but did not fill. This happens often, and it used to cause a great deal of anguish and regret. I would be like, “I put my target out too far, now I will be getting the fuck.” Now I don’t sweat the action, but instead manage that which I can control at this point. The /6E very well could have put in another thrust lower, and it still may, but it didn’t. Instead it put my position below water and then just held it there. Around noon I took a step back, had a stretch, and asked the following questions:
What has the /6E done?
What is the /6E trying to do?
How good of a job is the /6E doing on the try?
It’s helpful. I pulled my chart out a bit, noticed the /6e has gone very quiet, something I noted this morning. The market open introduced a strong thrust lower, but not to fresh swing lows. We’re making lower highs, but also higher lows: it’s coiling! That’s what it has done.
To my eye, the Euro is trying to do two things: the bulls are trying to work out of a range bound trade that lasted an entire year. They are not doing a great job so far. The bears are trying to reject range highs. They’re doing a decent job, but have been smacked about quite a bit these last 8-10 trading days. As a result, the /6E is marking time until an unknown factor causes order flow out of this consolidation.
It’s doing a pretty damn good job consolidating as the EMAs I track had gone completely flat on top of the VPOC.
So then, what’s it likely to do? It was likely to chop the consolidation range, the short trade was dead. Instead of just clicking the buy to cover and taking a 0.00012 loss, I was lucky to catch a bit of movement in my favor and only lose 0.0006. I didn’t want to be in a coin toss situation any more. I covered. My entry was good so I really have no complaints with the trade. It just as easily could have continued rotating lower.
And now you have read though my entire lunchtime /6E perspective and my subsequent introspective. Have a great one!
Tue Sep 17, 2013 11:55am ESTComments Off on Added Some Long Exposure
Part of me thinks the high of the day was set already in the SPX, but I went ahead and added some long exposure.
I am trading around my core in CREE, I added more long exposure to this name looking for a move into the earning’s gap. To be clear, I think we get rejection somewhere in the above gap initially, but I want to play a push into it, initially.
I bought MHR too. I like this name, and I like how it is flagging on the daily chart. That being said, it is still looking downward, so I have tight risk.
Mon Sep 16, 2013 3:31pm ESTComments Off on Lots of Hand Sitting
I couldn’t pull the trigger on anything today, not to sell existing shares, not to buy new shares, and I have SKF already which feel like a bit much in this tape.
I stalked CREE today, it is setting up perhaps. I wanted to buy shares much lower, so if this setup does trigger I may just trade a piece and go back into my core size (3/4).
Current longs, by size: RBCN, SKF, RVLT, AIXG, CREE, FB, LO, EXK, F, IMMR, MJNA, and O.
Cash around 25 percent.
The O was very strong at the open. That is a nasty little fade right there.
I lost some money in the futures today when I was shaken out of my short by the clown show in my brain. I called the head and shoulders this AM to the tick. But instead of capitalizing on it, I sat in traffic listening to Traffic. The clown ring leader is Gary Busey.
I’m holding out for my favorite setups before I put any more cash to work.
I was not actively trading the /ES today, but my algo was able to take two trades. One earned 1.75 handles and the other was breakeven.
My portfolio had a very strong day today, up nearly three percent and putting me back near my high watermark of the year. I’ve been trading my butt off to finance these investments in RVLT and CREE. As a result, when RVLT and CREE go up, I have big days.
Let’s discuss RVLT a bit. If we consider the sentiment chart idea, we find ourselves within the panic bounce. To me this means any rally we see over the next few days/weeks is likely to fail. How do you like that? I’m telling you right now that my largest position is involved in a failed rally. And that’s okay because my timeframe on this position is multi-year. Let’s hope I’m correct so we can have better opportunities to buy even more shares. Another anecdotal piece of evidence calling this rally into question is one of its origins: a {cringe} Seeking Alpha report. The bozos at SA (as the hipsters call them) were greased to help somebody get out of a seriously underwater position. This is just a theory, but their track record is eroding though the diligent work of iBankCoin Chief Market Strategist “The Fly”. It puts a foul stink on the whole move. If it wasn’t a pleasant twenty percent pressure release valve I would be even more ornery.
However, CREE reported they have retrofitted the NASA headquarters and done so quite successfully. Hmm, Cree really knows how to land the big fish, yes? Wrong! The biggest fish tend to be the wisest fish—having survived years of fishing and boat propellers. If/when these gigantic fish encounter a situation where their lighting is called into question, the data will unequivocally point them in the direction of LEDs. Any entity that weighs the financial impact of any business decision will see the cost benefit of retrofitting their existing light structure with LEDs. And CREE, RVLT, OESX, AIXG, RBCN, and GTAT will benefit. Look at GTAT…shorts better pray to their demon lords that sadistic seven holds as resistance. Otherwise the light, the good, shall prevail.
Other big winners today were TRLA, CLF, and END. Readers, I’ve been clear with my calls. It’s up to you to wrap risk around them. I scaled a small piece of TRLA off because I take profit when the markets giveth.
My SKF has gone red by about three percent. Tomorrow it comes to an interesting fork in the road where I’ll either buy more, do nothing, or scratch the trade. I was hesitant to add to the position today when the SPY absolutely refused to roll over. Checking back in just now, it appears it did manage to roll, BARELY. Until I see more confirmation, I’m not loving this trade.
END needs to rip, I mean, come’on now, we’ve been flirting with the idea of going all the way for weeks. Why not get past this game of just the tip as @chessNwine often references? I think we do, hence why I haven’t scaled any off yet.
CLF is tricky. It has been dead money for so long and now it shows signs of life. Do we trust it? Or do we take our six percent and dump this cheap trick? TBD
In closing, I kicked my cash up to 25 percent and could like to see some market weakness to buy my favorite stocks sitting on my wish list—names like Z, SFM, GOGO, AMBA, ADHD, and VPCO.
