Day Trading Post #64

Wow! It's been a long time since i last posted, but that is because I have been focusing my efforts on other things. Despite that, I am now focusing my efforts back on my trading. While I was on hiatus, I left some positions in place and things haven't gone too poorly. Unfortunately, looking back at some of my trades, I have been able to learn from my mistakes in regards to scaling out, holding too long, holding past profit targets. After going through my old trades, if I would have locked in profits when I had planned to originally, I would be up over 100% on my portfolio. But when you get excited in the moment of everything, you don't think as clearly or objectively as you are when you research for your stock picks. Anyway, when looking at my performance from my initial deposit of $4000, I managed to get about an 80% return on my money. Then, I deposited an additional $3000, and managed to bring my account value up to $12,000. Thus, I made an additional $2000 after my second deposit. That is a 66% return on the value of my second deposit, and a 74% return on my total investment of $7000. Well, feeling good about all of this, I went and deposited an additional $5000 into my account. This brought my total deposits to $13,000. I took some trades where I started to get greedy, and I got burned on 2 of them. LEA and CNB went sour and I lost approximately $2500. Then, I started focusing my efforts on studying for licensing exams and I stopped trading my personal account hence the lack of postings.

Anyway, I am now up on my account 20% overall with my entire deposit of $13,000. That's not too shabby, but now that I am back and focusing on my trades, I bought up $12,000 worth of positions yesterday off of some setups I liked. Things are going well, and I am in the money on most of my positions at this point.


Here are my most recent trades:



ALY is a cheap stock just under $5 that has a lot of potential. My notes are on the chart which explain my reasons for getting in. Overall, the setup looks very good to me. The SMI indicator is crossing over, there is no overhead resistance, and we have a 50/200 EMA crossover. I took 500 shares, and plan to take profits at some point after we break through $5. I do not have a tentative profit target on this trade as of now.

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VMW has reached a 2 year high. My main indicator, the SMI, show that the stock is turning over from being slightly over sold. There is no overhead resistance until about $51, so we have the potential to hit a home run with this one! Things look good, and for more technical details, check out my notes on the chart.

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AET looked promising as of yesterday, but today we have a gap down. I got into this based on the chart, and things looked as if AET were very oversold. The SMI is setting up, and I believe we have potential for this one to pop, but I plan to cut it off early if it doesn't cooperate with my plan. Check out the chart for my notes!

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I have been holding this one for a long time, but SLM still looks good to me. I got in back in early August because we had a falling wedge pattern that formed perfectly, and the SMI indicator was setup to pop. Then, we fell back into the channel, and the falling wedge continued to develop. Things still look good on it and I love that it never really went too far against me as it came back into the channel. Originally, I was trying to buy this up just before we broke the top trend line, but then I realized that I should have been buying every time we came down close to or touched the bottom trend line. As a result, I brought my average price down, and things are looking very promising right now. I will update this one as it plays out! Check the chart out for my notes.

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This is a screen shot of my current holdings in my portfolio. The only trades I haven't talked about in this post include SIRI, LDK, and SYMC. LDK is the only trade that kind of hurts right now, but I am holding because if I wasn't in it already, I am seeing a setup on the daily chart that I like. As a result, I probably would be looking to buy it at this point, so I haven't take the loss on it. SYMC is closing the gap, and turning out to be a great trade. I took small size with this one because I was testing the strategy out, and it seems to be playing out well. Unfortunately, it took a very long time for it to do so, but I am seeing many places where I could have added to my position, and increased my profit potential. SIRI is a monster! This one has a lot of potential, but is subject to a lot of manipulation. I think we have good things in store for us once the 3rd quarter earnings come out!

Anyway, that's all I have for now! I have some ideas for other postings, but have to decide if it's something I really want to include on my blog or not. With that said, good luck in the market!