Trade Review 3-7-08

I only traded the open today, for about 2 hours or so. I got in right before 7:30 and I forgot that the unemployment and non-farm payroll numbers are coming out. Almost everybody was certain that the number is not going to be good at all and you saw that people started selling off early, which was good b/c it made me cautious to trade SPY prior to the open b/c I haven't been very good at trading it in pre-opening hours. But what was weird was that when the numbers came out it shot up a little bit and made no sense what so ever. It might've been a bad connection like we sometimes have before. I need to pay attention more to important economics data that everybody on the Street is watching and make sure I'm at the desk before the data come out.

I had to go to Houston so I left around 10:30. I don't have all of my trades with me, but I remember I got printed on NLY-A down low and I got out through the ECN cross immediately. Well, that son of a bitch went up like two points from where I got printed. Maybe on some of these slightly thinner stocks, like different class, I should hold them a little bit longer. It's just dangerous b/c they could go against me very quickly though. But since I had such a nice head start the next time I'll try to get more profits out of it.

I was putting my new rule of not trading EEM or SLV more than 5 times a day to practice. I only traded SLV once and I lost money on it and I let it go against me a little bit too much as well. I really have to be careful not letting it slip past my stop. I think it really force me to find good entries and enforce discipline.

There was some news about the Fed ready to add more liquidity for lending I think so the market reversed and filled the gap from this morning, which just didn't make sense to me. I still believe there's weakness out in the market and I wanted to find a spot to get short. I actually traded SKF long but I got stopped out. The first two trades on EEM I got stopped out, 20 cents each but the next two were 50, 60 cent winners so I'm happy with my risk reward. Actually the 2nd winner I thought about giving it another 20 cent pull back and try to let it ride out but for some reason I didn't and covered my short... not smart. I saw on the admin that Zach probably got short as well and he was covering on the way down. I kind of wished that I traded a 1,000 shares on that last EEM trade, would've been nice... but then again I might not be able to hold the winner as well if I did.

Up about $400 for the day. about $800, $850 for the week. It's nice to know that I can still trade and make some money. It's not as big of a up week as I'd like and I didn't beat the other guys in my class but I think this is a step in the positive direction and I'll try to do better next week heading into the FOMC meeting on the 19th and 20th.