Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Week 2 Trade Breakdown

This was quite a losing week for me...while I anticipated a weak market, I onto into trouble with a number of key areas which I will need to learn from so I don't have anymore weeks of lost trades.

The bright side is that my capital stayed intact pretty well considering 3 shitty trades in a row, and managed only a loss of $154.66, however this should not happen again, since these were easy mistakes to correct in the future.

My first trade was a fantastic set up, and would have been some great quick gains, however poor on the execution.  The stock was YRCW, here are the charts I had made earlier:



My biggest mistake was't my bad order of stop limit, it was buying back in to try and chase the stock after the market had presented a gift of an oppertunity.  Followed shortly thereafter by the fact that  I gave a shit about a fancy entry that may have gotten .02 better price for the stock on what turned out to be an awesome rip of a short cover.  Of course I had not Idea this was going to happen, but the idea for a set up is planning out all options, hoping for the best and getting ready for the worst.

Loss of $45.52

The next trade I took was PCYC.  This was a tale of a penny stock which just simply failed to develop into the opportunity I thought I saw.  The idea behind the trade was that PCYC showed some strong volume a few days ago into some strong gains, which had tailed off in a pretty orderly fashion.  The stock also had a high short interest, so I figured it was a multi day bull flag formation, and would be buying into a big short covering opportunity, similar to YRCW.

The big lesson here is to not trade something with such pitiful volume.  After taking on this trade I figured the ticks in the chart happened very infrequently, and that it could go even 45 minutes before a trade.  No more of this B.S.

Here's a chart of my entry and exit:



Loss of $41.00

Finally was my BGU buy on support attempt.  Here is a chart of the price action (keep in mind my post about buying on the breakout the day before this move where I went completely against my analysis here)

 

Tight stop upon the market making my entry a foolish one.  I realize that as far as risk to reward goes, an entry on support is pretty hard to beat.  That being said, however I did one major thing wrong, I didn't wait for the price action to set up a reversal in price before entering.  The previous supports took an hour to 2 to finally exhaust themselves and reverse...I should have recognized this and used the information to my advantage.  Also I should realize that due to SEC regulations, I cannot trade more than 4 round trades within a 5 day period or else I would be considered a day trader and need 25k for capital, so I don't want to restrict my acct by over trading it - this also means I need to trade breakouts from longer term trends, so the breaks have some conviction to them, and because I don't have the ability to try to buy support, have it break thru my stop and flip the position.

Loss of $68.11

This is one week to remember, and to make sure it doesn't happen again.

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