+$11,376.47 in 43 minutes!! Redemption!!

All right, everyone. So let’s jump right in and start breaking down the trades from this morning. Today is a nice bounce back. Yesterday, started the month, started the year in the hole. You never like to start a year like that, and it’s not the first time I’ve done it, so I can say from experience it’s not fun, but it is the way it goes sometimes. So anyways, today is a really nice rebound. Finishing the morning up $11,376.47. Not bad for 43 minutes of trading. That’s it. I was done by 10:13. That was when I closed up my last trade, so the bulk of these profits were in the first 30 minutes and hitting a $12,000 winner on HGSH was very nice.

Now, you’ll see here three names I traded. I’m red on LEDS. This one I let ride a little more because I had such a big cushion on the day. So on this one I was up maybe like 1,500 bucks, and I gave it room to really open up thinking that it might work, and it ended up not working. I wouldn’t have done this if I didn’t already have a cushion on the name, and this is one of the things that someone asked me yesterday on the YouTube video in the comments. He said, “Ross, if you hit your $2,000 goal or you hit your $1,000 goal, why didn’t you just stop trading?” And here’s the thing: If I stop trading every time I hit my daily goal of $1,000 or whatever it is, $1,000 I guess is pretty much my goal, then I would never have the day when I make $30,000 or $40,000 because I would have stopped when I had that first winner that put me over the line.

And so you have to know when to be willing to keep trading and push it and when to step back, take your money, and walk away. It’s a tricky decision. The fact that there isn’t a hard set rule of when you cross this dollar amount you walk away means it’s left to your discretion, and anytime things are left to your discretion when it’s something like trading, there’s room for error. You made the wrong decision. Instead of taking the profit yesterday and walking away, I pushed it a little too hard and I finished the day in the red. Well, today I was up $9,800 on HGSH, and I kept trading and I made another $3,000 on that name, so finishing up 12,700 bucks on one stock, and that wouldn’t have happened if I wasn’t willing to keep trading.

So that’s just one of those things that you have to be able to each day take the temperature of the market, and are we in a strong market today where I can afford to be more aggressive? Do I have a big profit cushion? Or is the market a little bit choppier? And today I took my cue after two kind of small losses. The last loss on HGSH I gave back like 150 bucks, and the loss on LEDS I lost $1,600. So after those two, I said, “Okay, now I’m going to step back,” and that was I think probably the right place to do it.

So let’s look at HGSH. Well, actually, let’s look at WKHS first because this was the very first trade of the day. So WKHS was gapping up pre-market with news, and so we were watching this for a gap-and-go trade. So the pre-market highs were 3.25, and so as soon as the bell rang, this had dipped down just a little bit, and I jumped in as it started to squeeze up along 5,000 shares. I wanted to get in at 3.15, but remember, whenever I press an order, let’s say for PXS, if I want to get in at 3.16, my order is going to be like at 3.21. It’s usually five cents higher, and it’s because I do want to allow a little bit of slippage, because it’s usually better to get in a couple cents higher than to miss the whole opportunity.

So in this case I got in, but I was in not at exactly where I wanted to be. It popped up, and it tapped 3.25, and then it actually went all the way up to 3.30, and I sold as it was squeezing up at 3.23. I saw a couple sellers on the ask at 25, I wasn’t sure if it was really going to work, and I ended up stopping out. So I did sell this … Let’s see. Yeah, I sold it on the ask, and I did pick up liquidity for that exit, which is good, but wasn’t the easiest trade, so that was a small winner. 266 bucks first trade 30 seconds into the day, and I actually thought I sold half, and then I tried to sell the rest, and I got an error because I was already all out. So a little mix up on my hotkeys there.

And then the next one was HGSH, and this one was funny because it was on our watch list because it was gapping up. I believe the news was earnings, and so I said, “Well, it’s interesting. I’ll keep it on watch, but I don’t know. It’s a little cheap. I’m not sure it’s going to do much.” So I just kind of looked it over and didn’t think a lot about it, and then all of a sudden someone is like, “Look at HGSH. It’s squeezing up,” and it popped from a $1.80 right to two bucks, and so as I saw it made that big 20 cent move, that’s when I said, “Okay, I’m jumping in at $2.” And you can see here I got filled. I put out four orders, and all four of them were partial fills at 98, $2, 2.03, and 2.06. All of them were partial fills.

So I then have to cancel those orders because if I leave those orders out, I’m trying to buy 10,000 shares, and remember, my account is a little smaller right now, so I can’t leave those orders out or I’m going to get errors with exceed buying power, right? And that’s what ended up happening. I got errors about my buying power, so I was like, “Okay, I need to cancel these and then place a new order to add for the half-dollar break.” So I put a new order out to add for the half-dollar break, a 43, 44, and 45. At this point, I’m just like the stock is going super strong, it’s just taking off, so I’m going to try to ride the momentum.

So I now have an average of 25, 2.25, and my stop is kind of at that point right about break even because I was up 25 cents. It now gets halted on a circuit breaker for 10 minutes because it moved 10% in a five-minute period. It resumes at 3.24, and I’m up a dollar per share. Boom. Full dollar per share, and then you can see here it squeezes up. So on resumption, I started selling, and then I started adding. Ending up adding at 3.16, selling at 3.29, adding at 3.46, selling at 3.69, adding back at 3.46 and 3.50, selling at 3.65. So this is, again, the way I usually trade these moving in, moving out quickly as I’m watching the tape and reading the time in sales.

So learning to read the tape is a huge asset to you, and for me on a lot of these stocks there are certainly times where you could say, “Jeez, you would have been better off just holding your whole position from the beginning and just one entry and one exit,” and you could certainly do that as a beginner trader. I just don’t seem to do as well when I trade that way. I do better moving in and out as I see the level two and the time in sale. Anyways. Getting back in at 80, selling at 93, getting back in at 91, selling at 4.15, and then I had LEDS. So kind of wrapped up the trades there on that one.

LEDS hits the scanners, and it’s one of these stocks that kind of likes to do sympathy momentum. So you see one stock start to move, and next thing you know traders will jump into the next one. So whoever jumped into it down here at 4.25 obviously did very well on that squeeze up to 5.79. I tried to add as it was squeezing because I was like, “Okay, it’s strong and I know this one likes to pop up like this.” So I put out my order at 10,000 shares at 4.57. I was ready to step up to the plate, because at this point I’m like, “Look, I’m up 10,000 bucks. I can be a little aggressive.” I only filled 451 shares. So imagine if I filled 10,000 shares right there at 4.60. It squeezes up to 5.79. That would have been another $10,000. This would have been a $20,000 day.

Obviously, I didn’t get filled. It’s halted. It resumes at 10:00 a.m. I add at 5.40, 5.47. It pops up to a high of 5.79. I didn’t sell it because I thought maybe it would hit six dollars. Ended up pulling back down and I stopped out at 5.10, and a little slippage at 5.88. So, you know, that’s kind of just the way it goes. I guess I should have just sold it when I was up 20 cents or 30 cents after it broke over the half dollar, but I was just holding it thinking that maybe it would tap six dollars. So I gave it time for a one-minute micro pullback here, but then eventually it broke down on this candle and I couldn’t afford to keep holding it. So gave back a little bit of profit on that.

Then my very last trade on HGSH was on the five-minute setup. First five-minute candle to make a new high, which is a good pattern. You can see it here. So I got in anticipating the breakout at 3.76 and 3.78, adding at 3.99, expecting it to break over four. It then hits a hidden seller at four dollars, and you can see lots of buying, lots of accumulation at four, and it was not breaking that level. It hit, yeah, just four, and so I sold a little at 3.99 and sold the rest at 3.84 and 3.80, so gave back a little bit on that, but not much, and it was worth a stab because this could have gone all the way back up to high of day, and that would have been a fantastic trade. So it was definitely worth the $150 of risk.

So that’s about it for me today. Overall, a pretty solid day of trading. I didn’t actually tally up my accuracy here. So today is day 238 of the million dollar challenge. So we’re crossing out of the $100,000 challenge of 2017 and now carrying it into the million dollar challenge for 2018 and on. So sitting right now at $342,000, 34% of the way there. Up about $7,000 on the month. Obviously, yesterday was red, so had to jump back and get myself into the green. Hopefully, we just see some better opportunities in the next couple days, and I can be aggressive and get my way up towards $15,000, $20,000 on the month.

I don’t really have hard set monthly goals because, you know, some months I’ll make $80,000, and other months I’m only going to make like 10 grand. It’s just based on the market, and I can’t really control that. So if we’re in a really strong market, I’ll make a lot, it’ll be a great month. If the market slows down, I’ll have to slow down with it and let the profits from November and December kind of carry me over until we see some good follow through again, but I’m hoping that we see good continuation here in January, and I don’t see any reason why we wouldn’t. And look at this AQB yesterday. At two in the afternoon, this thing squeezes from four dollars all the way up to 10 bucks, a surprise afternoon squeeze. So we are still seeing some pretty incredible momentum. Yesterday, CHCI was also a strong one. It continued a little bit today. Today of course HGSH, LEDS.

PXS is an interesting one. This one popped up on the scanners, and it came right back down. [CONE 00:12:50], another one that popped up on the scanners and came right back down. So that’s when we started to see some false breakouts, and that’s when I said, “Yeah, I got to kind of reduce my risk here and scale back.” CPAH, lighter volume, has a nice window from like 3.88 to 6.79. CLNT, another one kind of creeping up, tapped 9.42 today, so it’s got kind of a window here, but, again, lighter volume on this one. Anyways, I’m just glad to be back in the green, and that’s definitely a better way to kind of start the year.

TEUM. Sure, I’ll answer your question on that. So why was TEUM not a stock that I was closely watching? So this one has been on the scanners a lot of days in the last couple weeks. You can see a lot of days it’s gapping and moving around, and if you look at the average volume, it’s like about 25 million shares a day, so very thickly traded. I, being someone who really likes to read the tape, I have a hard time reading the tape on stocks that have that much volume, 27 million shares, because I look at this and I’m like, “Oh, there’s a 17,000-share seller there. I kind of have to wait.” But when you have this amount of volume, someone can buy him up in a second. Someone could just place a 20,000-share order and he’s gone, and so you start to see … just the reading the tape is not as easy, and so you have to focus a little bit more on the chart, which is fine, except when stocks have this amount of volume, you see a lot of false breakouts because you kind of have …

I don’t know. It’s just a little bit more of a tug-of-war. Traders with a long bias, traders with a short bias. It doesn’t mean that this didn’t have some range today, especially right out of the gates. It did squeeze up to four, or to 3.40, but I just don’t feel like I trade these as well when they have that much volume. So I kind of steered clear. I would say maybe over 3.10 would have been a spot to potentially watch. I mean, that does look nice, but, yeah, I just am not as good at trading these ones when they get kind of thickly traded. I sort of just look at it as this tug-of-war. You’ve got traders with really deep pockets coming in, marketing in with huge size, and that creates these whips to the downside, whips to the upside, and I just find that I get chopped out. I get faked out a lot more when I trade them, so I don’t know why other than the level two and the tape being a little bit harder to read. So no trades on TEUM, but, yeah, good question there.

Jeffrey, your question there. Looking at those screens you have there, it’s like doing a checklist before you get catapulted off an aircraft carrier. So, yeah, we definitely have the pre-trading routine. Every single morning it’s like, “Okay, have I slept well? Eaten well? Check, check. Do I have a couple stocks I like? Check. What’s the condition of the overall market? We’re in a strong market. We’re in a medium market. We’re in a weak market. How many small caps do we have on the gap scanner? Is it a small cap day, or is it a large cap day? Do we have anything happening with like cryptocurrency? Is there going to be influence from the crypto markets today?” There is kind of that checklist that you do internally to make sure that this is the day to be aggressive.

HGSH, the reason I was aggressive on it was because it was gapping up with news, I was already familiar with it. I didn’t expect it to make a big move, but once it started to move, I jump on the momentum. And so I talk about that a lot that part of my strategy often is buying stocks high and selling them higher, so that kind of saying of buy low, sell high, it doesn’t really apply as much to day trading, because, look, HGSH was already gapping up 20%, so we’re obviously already buying it high. I mean, it’s already high. We’re not buying this low.

It’s high, but what I’ve found, and this was kind of the big discovery for me, is that every single day there are stocks that move 20 to 30%. Every single day. And so if we can get in those stocks when they’re up only five to 10% or maybe 20%, we can ride them for another 10, 20, 30%, and so even if we only capture a quarter of that 30% move, that’s still a big winner, especially compared to trying to trade stocks like your Apples and your Facebooks on a daily basis. These ones just become so difficult to try to day trade. Obviously, the volume is high, they’re really popular with the algos, the high-frequency traders, and it’s just something that is not easy for us to trade.

So let’s see. Skylar, no, I haven’t traded futures or Forex. Just stocks. It’s kind of one of these things. I sort of compare it to instruments in a band. You know how to play this one instrument, whatever, the guitar, and it doesn’t mean you don’t want to kind of maybe test out the drums at some point or maybe test the violin, but you kind of just have what comes naturally to you, and so you usually just stick with it and become a real master of that. There are some people who can just fluidly cross from one instrument to another, and obviously they’re incredibly talented musicians, and in the trading world incredibly talented traders, but I’ve never been really able to make those types of shifts. So I kind of am more of like, you know, I’m really good at what I’m good at, and I kind of block out everything else and try not to get too distracted by it.

And, Julie, the hotkey that I use for a lot of these trades, it’s shift-1, and so if we go into custom orders, buy, edit. You’ll see this is actually three cents above the ask. So at 2,500 shares, three cents above the ask on the market of Bats, so that’s the route I use. I could use Arca or EDGX, but I happen to use Bats. So let’s see. Say done.

So, yeah, anyways. That’s about it for me today. Overall, a good day. Back on the horse, and hopefully I can stay on the green side of the red to green line for the rest of the month and just keep building my way back up. You never know when … This could have just as easily been a day where I only made 200 bucks and I just had to say, “I’ll have to wait for tomorrow.” It’s not always the case that you get redemption the day after, and I wasn’t more aggressive today because I lost yesterday. I was just aggressive today because I saw a stock was really moving, and HGSH, if I hadn’t filled any of my position at two, I would have been maybe a little more cautious about adding at 2.50, but my average got bumped up to 2.25, and so I felt like I was still in good shape on that average.

All right, everyone, so that’s it for me. I’ll see all of you guys first thing tomorrow morning for day three of January. It’ll be day 239 of the one million dollar challenge. All right, so I hope you guys have all set your intentions for 2018, set your goals, whatever they are. Keep your stops right. Go for those 15, 20 cent winners knowing occasionally you’ll get a stock like HGSH that just really opens up and gives you the full dollar per share. So my average winner’s today are, let’s see, 39 cents per share. One is five cents, one is a dollar and one cent, one is 20 cents, one is 30 cents. So average winners of 39 cents, average losers of 17 cents. That’s a two-to-one profit-loss ratio. Accuracy today was 66%, just below my 68% average, so I can handle that, and hopefully we’ll be able to do it again tomorrow. All right, so I’ll see all of you guys first thing tomorrow morning around 9:00, 9:15 for our pre-market analysis. All right, I’ll see you guys then.

If you’re still watching, you must have really enjoyed that video, so why not subscribe and get email alerts any time I upload new content? Remember, when you subscribe, you become a member of the Warrior Trading family.