Don,
Glad to see you contributing to the thread. Now we are back on the right track. There is no such thing as right or wrong, but the dialogue helps all of us decided whether theory a is right or whether theory b makes more sense. Much better than personal attacks. After reading the many posts that you and the others spent until 3am writing, I figured I would add a few comments here.
(Don, I am not trying you, I am just posing food for thought for all those that listed to your points last night and think they can just do the same. You seem to have a great feel for it, so for you it might be succesfful, for others it might be disaster)
Let me get this out of the way. One of your early posts, well before midnight but far before the 3am night cap, someone got under your skin a bit and you rebutted with something like " I have more experience than anyone in here, more than this person, that person and more than Steve". I know you mind state when you wrote that (you were getting attacked) was much different than when you finished up at 3 (you finally realized you were accepted). As to your points about your experience, you could be right. You also did not say what kind of experience you had, good, bad, etc. To be honest, I hope you have had a great experience. if you do, GREAT FOR YOU. What I can say after reading your posts is that you shoot to trade 1 stock a day. So in a year, you trade about 200 - 300 , 1000 share lots per day. I usually handle that in one week. Yesterday,, I did about 56 trades for clients, listed stocks, otc stocks, bulletin boards, options, fixed income. One ticket was selling over 84000 shares of a $12 stock and about 15000 of an $8 stock. On the 15000 lot, we got about 3/16 better on each piece. This is addition to the 50 other 100 to 2 or three thousand share trades I handled. YesterdayFOR MY OWN ACCOUNT, I did a few trades, made decent money on CS and TXN, nothing special, definately not the 3000 you made picking the bottom on dell, but good money. A nice additive to my day's salary. Please don't ever get overly confident about your experience relative to others when it seems you trade a limited number of stocks per day. Sure you have done well, but was it you or was it dell?
Re: the number of stocks: To all, Don appears to be taking a hit or miss approach to day trading. Perhaps it is intuitive feel for particular stocks. Afterall, we all know that stocks have a certain feel. We ALL KNOW HOW GREAT dell has been, so choosing it as a day trading stock is a great move. Congrats to you Don. Nonetheless, most day traders should be in more than 1 stock a day. You can not win them all and if you only trade one stock, it is like betting black on a roulette table. The odds are better with dell, but you are still hit or miss. As a day trader, not too far from an investor, you would like to have a bit, wee bit of diversification.
Re: Concentration: Don, what would happen if they halted trading and said that Dell was going to miss its earnings. Absolutely, it is a huge longshot and sticking with a Dell you have far less chance than it happening with CS , WDC or other crap. After all you have more than 100%, about 150% of your trading account in the stock. What if when you picked the bottom within 1/4 point (which is very, very hard) the stock just kept sinking from there. Afterall dell is one of the few stocks that hasn't gotten creamed this year.
Re: Intuitive feel: The most highly skilled professionals in their respective industries have this. Ask a surgeon why he, on the spur of the moment, facing crisis, did this instead of that, he say "I don't know it just felt that way". As a pro basketball player why he went backdoor instead of to the middle he says the same. Why, because they have been around long enough and similar fact patterns come up that the truly successful can perceive and then, more importantly, can turn into directives for the future. According to you posts, you seem to have that feel. Nonetheless, the majority of participants in industries don't
Well, is that to say that only the Michael Jordans and Peter Benton's can be successful in their professions. No, it means that if you don't ahve that feel, you have to stick to a discipline. Focus on what a perfect day trader would do. I am not sure that you could get 2 people to agree on what exactly that is, but I think you can extrapolate much of it from this thread.
I can not speak for Don, but in deciding the direction of the market, one takes into consideration many, many variables. First you have to have a quote service that offers this data, you have to have it logically setup on your screen, and then you have to be able to see it all at one time. This, anyone can do. The hardest step is analyzing it, and making an immediate decision, a tough, stomach grinding decision. I am sure Don will tell you that buying 1000 dell, 87,000 buck, 150% of the account, is not an easy one. But with experience, you just learn to do it, to punch the button and roll the dice.
Some things I do:
1. I setup my screen so that on my quote monitor list, stocks are sorted by sectors, box makers, chips, hard drives, telecomm, pharms, drugs, steel, oil, utilities, etc. so I can see where money is moving. For example, I played CS yesterday without really having watched. Iw as watching Coms and CSCO and saw them getting much stronger and then turned to cs which was good on 2k for 1/2 point for me.
2. I make sure I have the trin, and the indices and ticks for the various indices. Explanations of these are on our site, yamner.com, go to yamner univ., stop by the contact page and say hi. The trin, for me, is one of the most important as it shows a change in momentum.
There are also tick quotes for all the various indices. for instance, tick, tiki, ticq. ticq is the nasdaq tick. tiki sp500 tick, tick overall tick.
The markets used to be real focused on bond markets, the greenspan factor, but that doesnt hold true right now. Nonetheless, I keep the bonds on my screen. Most don't ahve entitlements for bonds, so use the yields, which you can use to figure out what bonds are doing. TYX, TNX and FVX. thirty, ten and five year treasury.
Once I start to focus in on a few stocks, I bring them to my foremost screen with many columns, last, bid, ask, size, tdvol, volume, news etc and I focus in on it.
Graham - we should call him professor graham...love that guy!
The best day trader I ever knew was a guy named SC, I'll call him. While we (my firm) is definately not a soes shop, actually we are far, far from it, he came to our offices because we were close to his home, close to the school he was a gym teacher at. He started slowly and eventually was doing 20 to 30 round trips per day. He was like a machine, never looked away for the trading day, stuffed nasty looking sandwiched down his throat at noon, showed up every day at 7:45 and let at 4:15 after entering his trades in some out of busienss tracking software. This was about 10 years ago. The guy was totally impressive. He looked at a stock, thought it was going up, bought it. If it hesitated or moved up and halted, kissed it goodbye. He kept every single loss (with the rare exception) to unde 3/8s. 1/4 was his day trading stop. He would shoot to be right 75% of the time.
The guy walked in here with 30k in retail and 35ish in ira. left after a year to go back to teaching with 600k retail 500k ira. True story, swear to god.
He was the best I have ever seen, not because of the dollar amounts (there I have seen much better) but because of his discipline, his committment to trading properly, without emotion, and because he never never took stocks home. Losing 450, big deal, its one trade the next day. As long as he netted out for the week or month positive. What would not be tolerated would be taking home a SLOT, a CS or a COMS, the gap down losers.
Don't forget that a raging bull market confuses skill and luck. Rallying back to near year/historical highs makes up for taking things home etc. Nonetheless, I recall about four weeks ago the number of distressed phone calls I received from thread participants about the dell they took home at 90 and was now 80. That its back to 92 should be considered luck and thank your blessings, not skill.
You bought it for a trade, not for its fundamentals. Trade it, sell it, be flat at night. Go home with no worries about what the market will open at. If you do, you will look forward to the down 200 days because you can clean up on relief rallies where we close down 150 after being down the 200.
Hope this helps.
Regards,
Steve@yamner.com
Anyway, Don....Great trade on Dell yesterday...should be another good day today. |
