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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jacob Snyder who wrote (60647)	2/15/2002 6:43:01 PM
From: Sam Citron	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

He's having his lunch now. <g> eom

To: Jacob Snyder who wrote (60647)	2/16/2002 12:25:32 AM
From: advocatedevil	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 70976

Thanks Jacob. Here's some answers to your questions: 1. It looks to me, like most of your trades happened at the moment just after a change in direction on the stock chart. If it was going up, you waited until it had started to go down, and shorted (or sold a long position). Is that right? Yes. I tend to focus on direction changes and stall points while trying to avoid the constant head fakes. 2. Until noon, you had mostly short plays. After that, all long. What made you change your mind then? I ask, because the market was down, and I'd have expected AMAT to follow any strong clear market direction. We've had a nice run over the past week and I really thought we would continue the up trend today after yesterday's pause. I fought the tape most of the day hoping for the big reversal that never came. The afternoon series of long plays were almost all small wins. I was lucky that AMAT was relatively strong today, or I would have certainly taken some hits. 3. Your commissions are a trivial part of your cost, but only because your trading 3000 shares at a time. That's pretty much true, but it does add up. BTW, I don't take the time to deduct commissions in the status $ amounts I post here. I haven't totaled it up, but I'm sure it's a few thousand $ YTD. 4. Your holding period seemed to be about 10 minutes, for most trades. Is that a habit, or just today? I guess it's mostly habit. I sort of fell into this active trading routine during the past year. I was primarily swing trading prior to that. I give no conscious consideration to time, only to what I see and feel. Every so often I'll hold a play for a few days if I think its the right move. 5. You seem relaxed enough to constantly judge yourself, and quickly change your mind when something tells you you're wrong. That is, you expect to be wrong a not-small fraction of the time. I've been pretty lucky with wins averaging about 7 in 10 plays. Yeah, I expect to be wrong. It's kinda funny in a way because almost every action could be viewed as wrong because there's always a better move that could have been made. I simply take what I can get, move on and try not to think about the what ifs. While it's important to learn from past mistakes, it's also important to me to enjoy the game and not dwell on what might have been. 6. when did you have lunch? (or was it catered?) What was it that Gordon Gecko said? "Lunch is for whimps" (or somethin' like that). <g> AdvocateDevil