I met with Jane today. The meeting was suppose to take place last Tuesday but I wasn't in the office. I didn't trade that much last week so I don't think the data are affected that much. Basically it was good to confirm my thinking with some actual data. I think I'm pretty aware of my own trading.
February sucks, let's face it, so what I need to do for now is adapt to the market more. A lot of the moves don't follow through with much strength so I get stopped out all the time. People are confused and uncertain with which direction the market is suppose to go and you can see this from the chart of the Dow that it's just consolidating. I should be trading with less size (which I've been doing the opposite). My risk reward is not quite there. My down efficiency is higher than my up efficiency. I've been stretching out my winners more over time but I've also let my losers slip a little more. Here I should probably continue to look for better entries and tighten my loss on non-EEM stocks to about 7-10 cents instead of 15 like I've been giving it sometimes. Especially right now, I need to be more selective. Wait for just one more indicator to pull the trigger... look at the bollinger band, moving averages and volume more. My winning percentage is good, almost 60% My consistency is pretty low though, below 50%... meaning that I lose money more than half of my days but my winning days have been so much more than losing days it's actually been working for me.
It's easy to feel frustrated in this environment. Jane suggested just undertrade a little bit right now, get a few winning trades and then stretch that out into winning days to just right my head for now. And when the right opportunity comes, like say the Fed decision day coming up in March, be ready to capitalize.
We actually started talking a little bit about other traders and their charts and somehow we got to talking about Earl Nightingale's "the strangest secret," which is that you become what you think about. Martin Owens has been writing down his goals and just consistently hitting them. It's like a self-fulfilling prophecy. If I'm going to super in April like my original goal, really... I think I'll need back to back $7,000 months... which means about an average of $350 profit each day.
Enough with the big picture stuff... let's look at some of the trades today. I was down about $700 today but made it all back in one trade and then dipped back down in the negatives. Gold and Silver made a big dip in the morning today and I should've traded the bounce but I didn't pull the trigger. I think I feel more comfortable shorting the reversal plays than the bounces for some reason. I don't think I like trading SLV as much... it's feels choppier, maybe b/c not as many people are in it and that actually could be a good thing. Gold feels like it trends much nicer and if the position is against me I have ways to get out.
There was a trade that I got into in UPL, I got in when it broke whole number and scaled out on two minor pull backs. Bad hold... I think I'm going to pay attention more to stocks that have bounced off the previous resistance or support level more and places where floor flipped to become a ceiling and vice versa. There were some good ones in UA, UPL, and SHZ.
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