Thursday, March 31, 2016

3/31/2016 Trade Reviews

Today I was unprepared and came in and jumped in to a trade that was not even on my watchlist ( I did not have one as I got to the office 10 min after the market open) I should have sat on my hands and looked for the A set-ups. I have increased size to 1K under 10 stocks and 500 for 10 - 20 priced stocks. I am mad at myself and I hope I  learn from this.

Here are today's gappers that I should have prepared had I gotten in on time. There was JDST, LEU, GNCA and FIT

Below are my trades for today LEU

GNCA

Lessons
NO PLAN equal to NO TRADES
You get stopped out on a first try, keep an eye on the same stock and wait for the secondary set-up LEU

Wednesday, March 30, 2016

Example of Daily Process

This is an example of the daily process I will  be following.
1. Run gappers list from www.thestockmatketwatch.com.
2. Select top three stocks to watch at the open i.e in this example on 03/30/2016 I choose KERX, OPK and VRNT
 So the first thing I will do is put there three stocks on the 5 min montage and draw the daily levels. This  will be 45 min 20 min before the open.

Second part will come after the market open. I will wait for a clear set-up/ price action. No choppiness in price, solid candles. There one thing I have kind of noticed on the 5 min range. Most of the time if the price is trading above the higher part of the range and emas and vwap are below the price, it set-ups for a long and vice versa. I will explain that on another blog. In this case KERX looked less choppy and was trading on the lower part of the 5 min range and the ema's and vwap were on top. This was setting for an orb short pattern. . next  open the montage that has the 5 min and 2 min chart and watch both time frames closely but more so the 2 min for entry. Define my risk, and enter my trade and immediately put a mental stop and as soon as the price moves my way, enter a hard stop.

KERX was a good example as it showed both the first move and the secondary move. This I call vwap fade aka ema's sandwich.



Trading KERX using this process would have given potential $340. I will definitely use this process in the coming couple of months and test out the results and see if I make any progress.

I am back.

At this point I am know there is probably no one that looks at my blog as I stopped posting any trades or trade reviews. Well I am back and this time I am doing it for myself. This will be my trade journal. From today March 30th 2016, I will dedicate myself every day to post my trade reviews and take this as a learning tool. I haven't heard much success and it's been 1 year and half since I started real trading and I took a deeper look at myself and realized I got lost on the process and went out there hunting for a faster, quicker way to make money in trading. Well I learned the hard way and this brought me back to the basics.

Here are my goals for the next 6 months. 

Monetary goals
Daily - $50
Weekly - $250
Monthly  - $1000

Set-ups

The Opening Range Breakouts
Pullbacks to emas and vwap
Emas and vwap fades or sandwiches.

Risk Management
Risking $50 on a trade
500 shares – 10 cents (11 – 30)
1000 shares – 5 cents (3 – 10)
 
Daily Process.
I will borrow my mentor daily process and copy and paste most of it here as this serves as my guidance. In near future I will post my daily trading process. But at the moment I am working on it and using my mentor trading process as a guide.

"For me it begins with the nightly scan.  I not only use this to help build my watchlist but I use it to get an idea of what happened in the market that day such as if a particular sector is gaining momentum. Even though only 1/4th of the stocks on my watchlist actually ever set up for me as a possible trade, it helps me organize my thoughts and gives me much needed practice in reading charts and formulating plans.  I need this structure as being a full time teacher my time to research and chart intraday is very limited.  I have to start preparing at night.  I will eat dinner, have a little family time, take a shower to shake the day off, and start my scans.


I use Finviz for my nightly scans.  It is free, it has a great selection of technical indicators, and it provides a daily chart and some basic fundamental information.  I have two simple scans that I took straight from the Textbook Trading and TandemTrader DVD’s.  I start with Scan 1, and if there are more than 40 tickers, I’ll run Scan 2 to cut down the list.  You can click on them to see what they look like.  Also, I change the charts to candlesticks to take those distracting trend lines off!  From there I will begin looking on the daily charts to see if any of them have the potential to set up for a trade the next day.  Along with looking for stocks which have immediate setups that are looking like they will breakout, I will be looking for charts which show me that they can have nice moves with good range again and again.What I look for comes directly from the DVD’s.  I look for charts that may be gearing and setting up for an ABCD type move, one that can set up for an anticipated R/G (red to green) move, a weak open and then stabilize for a move upward, or a potential morning washout after a bullish or bearish close.   Here are some examples of what I am looking for:
Once I run the scans and pick out the charts I like, I will add them to my watchlist in TOS and pull up multiple time-frame charts to see how they compare to one another.  This is an example of SGMS.  I like this stock for a potential trade the next day because on all 3 charts it is close to breaking a key resistance level and half dollar mark and will most likely run to and possibly break the next whole dollar.
I still look at other watchlists from gurus but only to see if they came up with some of the same stocks I came up with.  I always have 2 plans for a possible trade.  If it sets up the way I want it to one way or the other, or fits one of the patterns I like, I trade it.  If not, I dump it and move on. 

A stock will either open red or green, with strength or weakness.  I always wait at least 15 minutes before I make any trade.  To make sure I wait I set all of my charts on 5 minute candles for the first 15 minutes to give me a clearer picture of what the stock wants to do.  Then I'll switch to 1 minute charts and choose my trades accordingly.  I do this because I am trading at work and I cannot allow myself to jump in a trade because I do not have time to watch every tick.  After 15 minutes I can usually tell whether I will trade a stock or not.  Sometimes I am wrong because stocks are often manipulated by market makers, but more often than not, I am right.

My goal this year is to start with making $250 a day and as my account keeps growing I'll raise it.  If I only average $250 a day I'll make $65,000 for the year which is what I make at my job.  Since I am starting with $5000 this year my position sizes will not be as high as they have been.  I will have to scale them up as my account grows. I will not use leverage like I did last year.  I fully expect to be between a $400 - $500 a day average by the end of the year, especially since I have 3 months in the summer to trade full time.  I look at it this way, a 1000 share position with just a .25 move is $250.  or 3 .10 moves is $300.  The only thing that can stop me from hitting that mark daily would be my responsibilities at my job."