Today was a “fool me” day.
With the payroll data came out bad, market was down big before open. Naturally, to preserve my capital, the prudent thing for me to do was to sell all my swing trades at the open in case the carnage turned out to be a colossal waterfall price action.
I placed all my sell order at market on open and was filled within 5 minutes of all my swing trades. I sold $APRI, $CCJ, $DNN, $DCTH, $IMUC, $MNKD, $POT all for small losses and locked in gain on $FB.
Then, as usual, I would be faced with situation when the waterfall situation didn’t happen. $FB began to climb as well as $IMUC. Did I kick myself? Of course I kicked myself but only for a brief moment. Hey, I’m not a robot just in case you haven’t noticed. Giving that the market was still down all morning, I wasn’t about to jump back in to buy anything.
I didn’t think $FB rally would hold so I waited for an opportunity to short. When I saw a bearish engulfment bar completed in a 15m chart, I implemented the short and was successful in banking a few coin using trailing stop. Afterward, I tried a couple of scalping trades on $FB (one long and one short) but was stopped out for tiny losses.
To me, scalping (with small number of shares than my usual swing trade size) is a good way to work out your boredom without hurting yourself. It keeps your mind occupied so you don’t go looking for some big fish to fry when there isn’t any.
Next, I saw RaginCajun’s post on Bird Flu play so I bought some $BCRX since someone recently also told me about the bird flu coming back in China. Later, I added more when price started to jump up.
$FB began to act up after consolidating in the low $27.xx area. I bought back a starter position when price action took out the high of the previous 15m bar. I placed a stop below intra-day low but was not stopped out when the closing bell rang.
For some reason, I decided that if we were not getting a waterfall action today, we might get it next week. So I bought $FAZ to hold for the weekend. Lo and behold, not long after I bought, $SPY began a strong rally and before I knew it, I was stopped out of $FAZ for a loss. Ouch!
At the end of the day, I still hold 63% cash which was what I wanted to hold anyway for the weekend.
I noticed that $SZYM spiked up into the close; I will keep an eye on this on Monday for a possible buy back of my position provided that the market do not go with another bearish convulsion.
If you have been reading my journals, you know that I’ve been taking plenty of small losses these days along with some locked in gains. The gains were usually much larger than my small losses. But the small losses do add up as well as the commission. Giving that the last month trading activities being locked in a consolidation range, these multiple small losses were to be expected and I don’t hold this against my trading process. Remember, we only knew about the consolidation range after the fact.
Eventually, when the stocks begin to run again, either up or down, all I need is to catch one of the runners and I will be banking coins in no times. Thus, as a swing trader, I’ve to be active to catch that elusive runner when it happens; hence the constant small losses I’m taking now and will be taking in the future.
Current holdings:
LRAD, AMRN, TINY, FB, BCRX and 63% cash.
My 2 cents.
The trades I made in the journal were time-stamped in twitter
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