The Triumphant Return

After being absent from work for two weeks I was a little bit concerned about picking things back up when I came back. The open on Wednesday, the first trading day of the year, was moving pretty fast for me and I had a hard time getting a read on what to scalp but I think I adjusted well since that really wasn't a problem the rest of the week. I started out w/a losing day on Wed. but that's b/c I kept trading SKF again... I really should probably stay away from that ETF for the rest of my life. If I really want to trade the S&P futures that moves a lot more I should probably go w/ SSO

I don't know for sure but I think I'm either the #2 or #3 rookie for the week. Mostly thanks to Friday's big move in TXI. The conference was going on and word on the street is that their EBITA guidance will be lowered so the stock gets hammered. I took 100 shares on the bounce back for almost $200. Some of the stuff or how Chris trades is kind of crazy. He would add to losers trying to pick the bounce... even I'm scared for him sometimes. When he was picking the TXI bounce he was down maybe $5,000 at one point.


I'm still trying to look for crosses after the market closed. It sucks now that the ETFs stop trading at 3:00 instead of 3:15pm, even the ones listed on AMEX. I need to try to hit the SPY slow quote more at the close... I forgot about that the past two days. I got hit on GPN on Thursday but I was careless since they had earnings. Since they beat their estimate and I got short @ 46.80 I wanted to get out. So I put out some hidden INET orders at 79 and 70 but both of them got taken which means now I need to get out of my long position... I put out another order at 81 and got out. I was finally to breathe again. Well, the next the overall market was selling off and GPN got two downgrades, the stupid thing went down to as low as $35.80... I could've made like $2,000 on it. Makes me upset!!!

I'm also trying to pick up on sweep plays. What I've seen and after talking to Mian about it is that sometimes when there's a surge in volume, espeically if all the orders favor one side, either the bid or the ask, the market tend to swipe down and bounce back up, almost like the u-quote plays we look for but not quite. I've tried it couple of times and it worked w/ LQD once and SNP on Friday. Patrick and Mian made a lot of money from some ETF one day. I also remember I had orders out on HEI.A and after not getting hitt all day I cancelled it after lunch then like an hour later it swept down... I think sometimes I just need to leave my order out there and I'll put a stop alert about 10 cents away so I know to cancel it when it gets too close. Also if I step away from my desk I need to cancel it, too.

Oh, one other thing that I've started doing is to have briefing in a really small window in the corner since I only have one screen. Since I had no real time quotes and I usually trade stuff w/ big moves on FSX on Facebook, I used Briefing.com to see any alerts on major news or things that made big moves like breaking the 20 or 50-ema. I used it and saw an opportunity to trade XLE yesterday when it was breaking down