Re: Can anyone recommend how to improve on the entries?
This is my biggest problem - and I am far from the authority on this - but the concept that helped me most was the idea of the painful entry. Someone told me that in every trade there will be pain and there will be joy. When you chase the entry and buy a stock that is going up and looks perfect, the joy comes first and the pain comes after the stock quickly reverses and you lose money. Good entries are the painful ones. You are buying a stock while it is going down - you get filled on the inside bid or better. In exchange for buying when others are selling, you get a better price. The object is to try to position yourself just ahead of the next wave of fear or greed. Sometimes you just get run over and the stock keeps dropping, but often you will find that you are just ahead of the masses as they rush in to buy what you just bought.
Look at the range of the stock on your bar chart, whatever interval, and try to plot your entry points. When I did this, I found that I was always buying at the top of the range because I was chasing the entry.
We have a couple guys who make a few thousand every day on JNPR and a few of the other wild ones. They wait until the stock has moved to what they consider the bottom of its range, and stick a bid out a few levels outside the best bid. I am amazed at the fills they get. Sometimes they are filled 1/4 point better than the inside bid, because they are on the other end of the panic selling. This takes intestinal fortitude because they are buying when the stock looks awful on the level 2. When/if the stock goes back up, they do the same thing on the offer - offer at a higher price and get filled by a panic buyer.
All of this may be reversed for shorting - offer out into the bounce.
IMHO, many of the lessons you need to learn are inside of you. They will come as you identify trading mistakes and learn more about yourself from them. If you are trading now and treading water, that is great. The longer you can go without losing your money, the closer you are to your $10k/day.
Good luck and welcome to the thread. |
