One thing to distinguish...Newer traders may feel they have intuition, where it might be just "hope" or "want" as I feel they don't have enough experience to justify it as intuition..this is just my opinion as I feel intuition is bred upon experience of information being digested by our inner self, ready to be released at a later point in time.
Chris, I completely agree with this assessment. Being a newer trader, I don't think I have ever experienced trading intuition, although I have experienced intuition in other walks of life (music performance) and I relate my experiences to that. If I ever find myself thinking "I've got a feeling this stock is going higher." I immediately try to knock myself back down to earth. "Based on what?" "How?" "Why?" I usually tell myself that I am not really feeling anything, and that I should just watch the tape. I think at this point in my development I wouldn't know the difference between a hunch and true trading intuition if one hit me over the head with a 2 x 4. I could be wrong but at my early stage it is better to be safe than sorry.
On a somewhat related topic, I had an interesting experience with ORCL on Friday I would like to share. I watched ORCL trade down to 25 in the premarket and then bounce up again. It was in a range of 25 to 25 1/4 for some time, but broke out over 25 1/4 just before the open...so I never entered on the breakout because I don't trade in the premarket. Because of the overall weak market conditions and the fact that ORCL had gapped down 6%, I decided if it broke the premarket low of 25 I would try and short it on the pullback if I could get an entry. Anyway, normally I would move on to other stocks and just watch a stock like ORCL out of the corner of my eye (possibly on level 1), to see if a setup developed. But instead, I kept ORCL on my Level 2 screen and watched it the entire time even though it looked strong for the first 45 minutes after the open. Even though ORCL has a large float and the volume was high, I started to get a good feel for it. (I thought). I felt I had a sense of when the momentum turned and when weakness began to set in, by watching how the stock reacted at various levels. What I am trying to say is I feel I got a read on a stock I would normally consider very hard to read by leaving it up on my screen and watching it react at different levels of support and resistance. Eventually my setup did occur and I took a nice gain when ORCL dropped from 25 to 24 1/2.
Normally I am scanning the market all morning for stocks to give the setups I am looking for, putting them on and taking them off my level II screens and charts. But because of this experience, I think I will watch at least one or two active stocks closely the entire morning (not necessarily the big caps) which have the potential for a nice trade setup.
Regards,
Alex |
