Finally, a trade I can be proud of.
Preface
Wednesday was another down Naz day but somehow, OJ executed a trade that he was kind enough to let us in on his entry and exit. I was following along with his posts on my charts. I was impressed and asked him how he found such a great entry point on such a bearish market day. He explained that he used support and responded to my question, explaining the bar he entered on. Also, Jeff Jordan mentioned he may be folowing the SPX support levels too. These things sounded familiar to me and it made me realize that even though I've been studying for a long time about TA, when it comes to implementing, it wasn't connecting. I hadn't been applying the knowledge.
Thursday, after another stupid trade that got me a big loss, I got agitated into some more learning action. OJ was updating the thread on the indexes. The same time I was reading in Toni Turner's A Beginner's Guide to Day Trading Online, about following indexes of S&P and index of the industry group of your stock.
Applying it
Friday, a post on the thread was about how a major player in semiconductor group was doing well after an upgrade and it may be helping other stocks in the sector. VTSS was mentioned and it looked like a strong stock making higher highs and lows, intraday for about a day and a half, having corrected after 3 bars and on a bit of a recovery. This is a common setup as explained by Jenna, Toni Turner's book and others.
I checked the S&P 500 and it was making positive moves, also the NY Computer Tech and Naz Computer indexes, XCI and IXCO were turning upward and the bars even seemed to synch up with VTSS. I didn't go with the leader stock because it was up early and stayed up with no price swings. But VTSS was beginning to come back to support The bars were also contracting their range and picking up volume on the up side.
Support was a wide zone but centered more or less on 61. High at 9:45ish was 64. Fell back in 4 5min bars to 61. I entered at 61 ¬. I had to live thru 2 valleys taking my gain to 1/8 and then another down to ¬, but these lows were higher and the highs were higher. After a steep increase from a low, I decided it may drop back just as steep as it was up -- I observe this often. This was a daytrade and I decided to exit with a point since I was basing the trade on a 5 min. bar setup and not much more than technicals and market conditions, no fundamentals.
Broker Fun
After I hit the execute button, I was asked to log in again, I reached session's max time?. In shock, I logged in as I saw a tick drop the price 3/8 point. Then it bounced back up higher than my intended execution. Being glad for the delay, I re-entered my sell, it was invalid, so the original sell went thru. So Fidelity had accepted my execution, then told me to log in again. That was a surprise since usually you are told to log in and whatever you did to trigger it isn't completed? Still got my point.
Doubting my ability again
After all I did, I was wondering if it worked out just because the day was bullish. You know what they say about bull market vs. brains. However, I've lost and traded poorly on plenty of bullish days too. I finally had enough reasoning behind this trade and even though it was an emotional rollercoaster, the emotions I felt didn't interfere with the decision-making process.
Excitement turns into work
Having one successful setup and follow thru is nice, but there can be a lot of wasted time looking for only one when I know there are others. So the day after I'm studying the rest of the setups in the Turner book and the MG manual and the Pristine free areas. The Naz was a bear again, so I didn't even trade. I'm making posters of all the setups I can find for my wall, and organizing all my charting software and lists to find them.
Conclusion
The decent trade at least restored my confidence and I'm in no rush now to prove I can trade. The mind games are over and it's down to the daily grind of data processing and visually scanning charts after software helps digest some. Still beats the last day job I had. Thanks to the great people on the MG SI thread, each time I stopped trading for a few months, I went back to the books, all in cash, and emerged smarter. Then, with all the technology in place and interaction with traders, the positive input, even humor, it starts to come together.
If this is just the start, then I won't be one of those people who used to post here a lot that Lee was wondering what happened to. -John NY. |
