100th Trading Day of the year and 2nd Day MOMO on $MBOT

All right everyone, so time for our midday market recap. Today is June 1st and so far this is a choppy start to the month. I’m finishing the day down fifty-three dollars. But interestingly, this would have been a good day if I hadn’t made a mistake on PANW.

So I’ll show you guys my PNL for today. I’ve got minus twelve-sixty-eight on PANW, minus six-twenty on HIMX, minus one-twenty-two on SPI, plus four-ninety-one on PPG, and plus fourteen-sixty-six on MBOT. All right, so MBOT was a good trade … Fourteen hundred bucks. That was solid. PANW was a bad trade.

So, what happened there? Well PANW was only sort of on my watch this morning as a possible … Either a possible reversal or possible momentum trade, and right out of the gate it squeezed up from one-thirty-three all the way up to one-thirty-nine. So I was like, Okay, this thing is showing some serious momentum. I’m gonna buy a one minute micro pull-back and I’m gonna start with one-hundred shares.

I wanted one-hundred shares at one-thirty-nine, and I accidentally bought a thousand. So it popped up to one-thirty-nine-sixty-three, and then it dropped right down to one-thirty-seven-fifty-four, and just like that I lost twelve-hundred bucks. So, you know, I mean, what can you do? It is what it is. I was gonna start with a hundred, add another hundred, maybe scale up to four-hundred or five-hundred shares.

But, obviously, you know, not the way you really want to start your day, but these things happen. It’s just part of the deal with trading. I mean, you’re gonna have hot key errors. You’re gonna have times where you type in a thousand when you meant a hundred, or where you type in twenty-five-thousand where you meant twenty-five-hundred. I’ve had all of those things happen to me before. I kind of just … All of a sudden I was down, and I was like, okay, well, you know, let’s see what this does. I’ll give it a second. Maybe I’ll be able to ride it out and it will end up being an okay trade,” but obviously that wasn’t the case.

So that was my first trade on PANW. I got back in … I actually got back in at one-thirty-nine right here and it popped up to one-thirty-nine-ninety-seven, and I was like, Okay, maybe this one will be, you know, help redeem, you know, get back some of that loss. But on that one minute candle, it went up ninety-seven cents, and on the second one, it came down to break even. Went up to seventy-four … Back down to down fifteen cents, and then when it came back up, I sold it flat. So, I didn’t even make money or lose money on that one; that was just a flat trade.

So, I was like, all right … PANW, too choppy; I’m gonna leave that one alone. Next trade was SPI … This one, a hundred twenty two dollar loss … I jumped into this … This was actually … I think I got into this before PANW. I got into this one right here on a one minute opening range breakout. I was long at two-twenty-seven, with a target hitting pre-market highs, which was two-thirty-eight, would pop up to a high of two-thirty, and then we dropped all the way down to two dollars. I stopped out with only a hundred and twenty two dollars in losses of … I kept that stock very tight.

It dropped down, it came all the way back up to thirty-five, and then dropped all the way back down to one-ninety-eight. Then it came all the way back up to thirty. Then it dropped all the way back down to eighty-six. So, just totally, like, up, down, up, down … Not clean. Not an easy one to trade, so that one, probably gonna be on the no trade list from now on.

So that was SPI. MBOT … I took two trades on this one. I think it was two trades. My first trade, I actually got in this right down here, but only with ninety shares. I only got a partial fill. I got in at four dollars, looking for a red to green move; first candle to make a new high … It popped up to four-ten. It didn’t hold that level … Came back down, and I stopped out at ninety-five, so I lost five cents on ninety shares … So like, five bucks. So whatever … Stopped out of that and just sort of ignored it for a little while.

And then Zade called out PPG as a possible reversal, and I looked at that, and I was like, you know what? He’s, I mean he’s right. It looks really good. This stock just went from one hundred and six dollars to one hundred and ten. So, on this one, I felt pretty confident on this one. I really did. I was like, this looks like a good reversal; I’m gonna short the first candle to make a new low. So let me show you guys who are watching on Facebook.

So this had squeezed up from a hundred and six dollars, all the way up to a high here of a hundred and ten dollars. So, first candle to make a new low was under one ten, and on this one … I felt comfortable shorting with a thousand shares because this felt like a really good setup with low risk. Stop was HIVE day, but I don’t use a lot of stops, so my mental stop was HIVE day. So the high was thirty-two, and then what happened was, it dropped down for a second, down to a low of nine-ninety … one-oh-nine-ninety, and it popped up to forty-seven, like in the blink of an eye, and then it came all the way back down to one-oh-nine-forty-three. So, I was like, whoa that was close, but okay … Consolidating down here, and I decided to cover during this consolidation for four hundred and ninety dollars.

So it ended up being a good reversal trade. If I’d been willing to hold it longer I could’ve done better on it, and maybe I should’ve, but I just sort of like, during this consolidation, it could very very quickly pop back up to break even. And part of me was thinking, you know what, just put your stop at break even and walk away. Just walk away, and just hold it; maybe it’ll come back in an hour, and it’ll be at 108. And you’ll be up two-thousand dollars.

But then I said, you know what, that’s not your strategy. You’re doing that because you’re down twelve-hundred on PANW, and you’re just kind of hoping that this ends up becoming a huge win. And that’s not the way you trade. You’re up four hundred bucks; take the profit. Right? Take the profit. Don’t let it go back to break even. Just take the profit. Even the second trade on PANW, I was up ninety-seven cents, and I didn’t take the profit ’cause that didn’t even come close to making back what I’d lost, but you know what, it would’ve put a dent in it. And if I’d taken that profit, I’d actually be green on the day, right now. So, you know, you have one big loss, you’re not gonna make it back all in one trade. You make it back in three decent small trades … usually. I mean, occasionally, you’ll have one good trade, but usually it’s gonna be several small trades that kind of dig your way out of the hole.

So anyway, on PPG I covered on this consolidation … We popped up to a high of 66, and when we popped up right here from a low of one-oh-nine-twenty to a high of one-oh-nine-sixty-six, I went from being up eight-hundred dollars to being up only three hundred and twenty. And that’s when I was like, you know what? I could end up stopping out of this break even or even for a loss very quickly; I need to start thinking about booking a little bit of a profit on it, and so that’s why I decided to cover. You know, it dropped down here, and it dropped down here, but then it kept popping back up, so that’s what made me a little unsure. Obviously, it ended up fading, but I’m okay with the way I traded that one.

So at that point, I was still down nine-hundred bucks on the day, and I saw HIMX squeezing up, and that was right around here when it hit seven sixty. So when it hit seven sixty, I looked at that, and I was like, you know what? I think this thing … I think it’s gonna roll over. I really think it’s gonna roll over. It just squeezed up from seven twenty to seven sixty; I’m gonna short this with a stop at the highs, but I shorted it at the half dollar right here thinking it was going to break below the half dollar. It dropped down to seven fifty. It held support at that level. Then it pops up to seven sixty. It drops back down here to fifty-one, down to forty-two, and it pops back up to sixty-six.

So on this one, I covered a six hundred twenty dollar loss. And I was kind of like, all right, that was maybe a stupid trade. I don’t usually short these, and I thought it was extended; I really thought it was going to roll over, but you know at that point, I was like okay, I think I’m grasping for straws a little bit, and maybe I should just throw in the towel and be done on the day.

But that’s when MBOT came back up on the scanners, breaking through the VWAP, right down here at ten thirty. As it broke through the VWAP, I looked at that, and I said, you know what? This looks a lot like APHB and some of the other stocks that we’ve traded in the last couple weeks, breaking through the VWAP and then squeezing through the highs. So it was like, you know what? I’m gonna take a stab at this with a long at four twenty. So I got in at four seven or yeah, actually it was right around four-twenty; I got in, like, four twenty two, or something like that … a little bit of slippage. We popped up to a high of four thirty. We dropped down to a low of four oh five and I thought, hmm … This is gonna be another loss. Stop was three ninety nine. Consolidating sideways, I didn’t want to sell on the support of the moving average; instead I’d rather have a stop below the moving average, so that was where my stop was. We held that level … Consolidation … And then we squeezed up to a high of forty two …

Consolidating … Consolidating, and as we squeezed and broke over forty two I doubled my position, which gave me an average of thirty two … Just about thirty-one, thirty-two, and from that point, we squeezed up to a high of forty-seven, sixty, and yeah, fifty-seven and sixty. And right in there, I sold 80% of my position. I was like, all right, I’m gonna take the profit. I’m up thirty cents. This is the smart thing to do … Scaled down to five hundred shares and stopped out as it came back down. Now, I did stop out kind of … Actually, I stopped out the rest of it at forty-five thinking at that point, I would wait for a five minute setup.

And I said, all right, you just got yourself back to being down only fifty-three dollars. Consider that a victory today. Just, this is obviously not the best day ever for me, so maybe just be done. I don’t have a cushion. I can’t really be super aggressive, so let’s just maybe throw in the towel. So, I was like, I’m gonna get up. I’m gonna walk away. I’m gonna let this consolidate on the five minute chart. Five minute consolidation, the high right now is four-fifty-seven. The high today was four-sixty, so I was like, I want to see two red candles; that gives me ten minutes right now. Two five minute candles is gonna take ten minutes to form; I’m gonna walk away for about five minutes. I don’t want to chase it. I don’t want to jump in this too high, and then end up losing, you know, twenty cents on two thousand shares of being down four-fifty. I don’t want to do that, so I said, I’m gonna walk away for a second.

I walk away and when I came back, it was at five dollars, right here. So I was like, you know what? Maybe if I had stayed I would’ve gotten in at four-sixty, ’cause that was the level I was watching. That was the level that was the high of day. The high of this candle was four fifty seven, so I probably would’ve added at four fifty-seven, maybe doubled at four-sixty. You know what? It would’ve worked pretty well. It went to seventy-five right away, and then it went to eighty-one, and then to eighty-eight, and then to five-oh-three.

So, you know, I had a little hindsight regret, and then I said, well, let’s wait for the next five minute setup, but I didn’t want to take this five minute setup because I thought it was too extended off the nine moving average on this pull-back. We weren’t gonna tap that level, so I didn’t get in at ninety-seven, and then of course, it went up to thirty-seven. And at that point, I was starting to get a little frustrated, so I thought, you know what? I don’t want to chase this. Let’s just be happy. I pulled fourteen-hundred-dollars out of that stock today. Maybe it’ll be in play later this afternoon. Maybe it’ll be in play tomorrow. But for right now, I’m just gonna not overtrade it, and you know, live to trade another day. So I’ll be back at it tomorrow, and, you know, look for either this or something else to give me that one opportunity to capture twenty, thirty cents out of the market with four or five thousand shares.

So today was a day where, if it hadn’t been for a kind of, you know, just, you know hockey … Well, it wasn’t a hockey but just a typo, I would’ve actually had a pretty good day, and if it hadn’t been for that typo, I probably wouldn’t have taken the short on HIMX. I think that was me kind of grasping at straws, so probably wouldn’t have taken that trade. I might not have taken as much size on PPG, but MBOT, I probably would’ve traded the same way.

So, you can see how what happens in the first five minutes can kind of color how you’re gonna trade the rest of the day. It can just change you’re emotion a little bit … make you a little bit more aggressive, make you a little bit more conservative, get you frustrated … Whatever it might be. So, yeah, today is the first day of the month … Didn’t make a lot of progress but also didn’t give up much, and that’s always a good thing.

So we talked about how my worst day last month was a seven-hundred dollar loss, and you know, I’d like to keep that this month, as well. I mean, obviously, I was down fourteen-hundred bucks, or fifteen-hundred bucks at one point today, thinking that this is not how I want to start the month, but I was able to recover that.

Today is actually the one-hundredth trading day of the year but kind of a non-event, as I’m finishing the day down fifty-three dollars. So my one-hundredth trading day … probably on the one-hundred and fourth trading day … I think I’ve had, like, three or four days that I’ve taken off this month … or this year. So today is my one-hundredth trading day of the year, and I’m a little over one-hundred-and-fifty-thousand dollars in profit, so that has me averaging fifteen-hundred dollars a day. But certainly that average is more heavily weighted … I’m, it looks like at around a-hundred-and-fifty-three-thousand, but I was definitely trading, you know, doing a lot better in the first three months than I have in the second three months, so we’ll see how summer plays out, and hopefully we get some good opportunities.

A trade like MBOT … I could’ve been more aggressive on this. You know, like, I’m gonna jump in five, ten, fifteen, maybe twenty thousand shares, but we’ve been in a market where I’ve felt it’s important to be a little more cautious, and so as a result, I haven’t been pushing it as hard when we see these setups. If we start to see really good follow-through, the way we did today on MBOT, on a daily basis, then I’m gonna, you know, I’m gonna increase the risk. I’m gonna be a little more aggressive and try to capitalize on this opportunity to make some money.

But you have to be able to adapt to the market, and right now, the market has been, you know, just a little shifty. But you know, that’s part of the deal. You know, it didn’t stop me from making about seventeen-thousand dollars in May, and hopefully I’ll be able to do something similar, at a minimum, for the month of June … You know, fifteen, twenty-thousand would be a good, kind of minimum, target.

All right, so I see some of you guys commenting on Facebook Live. I’ll go through … Anyone who puts in comments, I’ll answer them this afternoon, so you guys can feel free to add comments. Same with You Tube … People who put comments in the feed, I’ll answer those this afternoon. Okay? So, that’s it for today. Coming up on 1:00 … Still the middle of the kind of lunch hour. It’s a two hour lunch hour from twelve to two, but those of you that are gonna trade in the afternoon, just make sure you’re cautious, if you don’t have a cushion from the morning, starting in the afternoon at zero is a very tough thing to do. So, for myself, I’m not gonna trade the afternoon.

All right, let’s keep an eye on MBOT, maybe for continuation for tomorrow. Volume right now is much much lower than it was earlier today, so, I’d be careful about trying to trade it in this area. But, you know, we’ll keep an eye on it, and see what it does. All right, so that’s it for now. I’ll see you guys this afternoon.