+$1,309.70 on the 12th green day of the month!

All right, so we’re going to go over the trades from today here. I’m finishing the day up $1,309.70, which isn’t bad. This is the 134th trading day of the year. I’m finishing the week up about $4,700, $4,600, which is pretty good. I’m going to be out tomorrow. Tomorrow is a travel day, but I’ll be back at it first thing on Monday morning.

This week has been, for sure, a decent week, but one of the things that’s interesting is the fact that I’m still recovering from the red day that I had last week. Last week, on Wednesday, I got really aggressive and unnecessarily lost $8,000. I was down 1,000 bucks on the day, and then I took a trade where I was swinging for the fences. I missed, and I lost eight grand. That put me down $4,300 on the week for last week, so finishing this week up $4,600, I’m only net $300 in the last two weeks.

Even though the last one, two, three, four, five, six days have all been really good days, and in this six days, I’ve made, let’s see, $4,600 this week plus … Made probably $6,000. About $6,300. That still puts me down 1,700 bucks from that Wednesday, so I’m still digging myself out of the hole. Every day this week, I’ve had to keep that in my mind, that I’m still trying to recover from that day that I got unnecessarily aggressive.

Just a reminder that even though these last few days have been really good, the reality is I’m still trying to get myself back to where I was last Wednesday. When you have a really big setback like that, it can take a full week to recover. Sometimes it can take weeks or even months to recover if you’ve got a big setback. Just something there to be mindful of for all of you guys.

The lesson is keep your stops as tight as possible. Minimize your losses as much as you can. When you end up doing something silly in the heat of the moment and taking a really big loss, it can take you days or weeks to recover from it.

That’s basically where I’m at here. I haven’t fully recovered from it this week. This week has been decent, but my biggest green day was only 1,800 bucks, so that doesn’t get me all the way out of the hole from an $8,000 red day. So I expect by the end of the month, I’ll be back out of the hole. As of right now, I’m up about $9,000 on the month.

That’s because I made $8,700 in the first week of the month, and then I lost $4,300, and then I made back $4,600, so I’m only up nine grand. If I had not lost $7,000 on that one trade, I’d be up $16,000 on the month, and that would be a much more respectable month and I would be in shape to be in the 20s, in the $20,000 range by the end of next week. That’s not looking realistic right now. That one trade really set me back this month, and it’s disappointing.

I had a couple of rough days in June that set me back, as well. May was good, $17,000, but I’ve just been trying to get into a groove with some really nice, big winners. Having that setback really didn’t help. The reality is I’ve only had one red day this month. Only one red day. We’ve had 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 13 trading days, so I’m green on 12 out of 13, but that one red day, that one day was a bad one.

Again, the lesson there being follow your max loss. Now, for me, I’m now reimposing my max loss of $1,000 a day. If I’m down 1,000 bucks, I’m done for the day. If I had followed that rule, I would have been down about $1,200 that day, and I wouldn’t have used that revenge trading aggression and frustration to get into that final trade that cost me $7,000.

I bought a stock squeezing up out of a circuit-breaker halt. I took huge size, biggest position I’ve taken this month. Actually, maybe second biggest, but really big size. Why did I take such big size? It was because I was in the red. I was trying to compensate, trying to get myself out of the hole. I was getting too aggressive.

I maybe had the right idea, but it wasn’t the worst setup I’ve ever seen. It just didn’t work. It ended up costing me a lot. It’s just the whole thing went wrong. That one day pretty much casts a shadow over the entire month of July for me, which is disappointing, but you live and you learn. It’s the biggest loss I had taken since I think April or March.

The more time you can put between those big, big red days, the better. That’s really the best thing you can do. You’re not going to avoid them entirely. Just try to space them out as much as you can. The market will remind you from time to time if you get complacent, if you get sloppy, you’re going to get a quick loss. When you trade with big size the way I do, it’s bound to happen. Anyways, that’s where I’m sitting on the month right now.

Now, the trades from today were decent. My first trade on DFFN was really solid. DFFN was gapping up this morning on news, so it was a gapper with news, history being a former runner. It had a catalyst. It had everything we look for. I was watching, when the bell rang, for a possible long over $2.60. It opened at 251 and immediately surged up to $2.73.

I was kind of like, well, if I got in at $2.60 on the one minute, I felt that I was chasing it a little, so I was like, “I’ll wait.” Then, I did a one-minute opening range breakout. I waited for this one-minute candle to close here. I take the high as my entry and the low as my stop. High is my entry, low is my stop. Now, in this case, that’s 30 cents. I wouldn’t have given this the full 30 cents. I only would have given it 10 cents. Now, I have a tighter stop at 63. I’m long with 7,500 shares. It pops up to 83, 93, and then all the way up to $3.04.

On that trade, what I did, actually, is I started … I’ll scroll back here. I started with 7,500 shares at 69, so I got filled a little bit under 70, anticipating the first one-minute candle to make a new high. I added 2,500 shares at 80, so now I had 10,000, full size. Then, I scaled back and sold 4,500 at 87. I sold another 2,700 at 80.

Then, I added back 2,500 and 2,500 at 90. Added back 5,000. Basically, what I was doing is I was selling into the squeeze, and then when it pulled back for just a second here, I added for the break over $3. Then, I put an order to sell at 96 I didn’t fell. I sold at 93 and 91 and 96 and through there. I then added back at 95, and I stopped out of that trade at 73, so that was a $500 loss. I was up $1,500 on my first couple trades.

Then, on my second trade, which was an entry right here, I got stopped out as it came back down. That was unfortunate, but I did the right thing here, which was size down after I hit my daily goal, because I was up 1,500 bucks in the first three minutes. If I had gone back into the second trade with 5,000 or 10,000 shares, I would have given back my entire morning, and that’s not, obviously, what I wanted to do. So I scaled back, which was the right thing to do.

Next trade was on AEZS. This one wasn’t very easy. Kind of disappointing. I jumped into it at 90. Let’s see. We had a high here at 95. Dropped down to 97. I got in this at $9.37, so it was right here. That candle had a high of 91. As we popped up, I got in at 90. Now, on this one, I got 7,500 shares with an average of 93 or 92. I just wasn’t feeling it.

It popped up here to 95. It dropped down to 90. I was like this is a very thickly traded stock. I don’t think I want to be in this. I’m just going to bail out. So I sold it at summit 95. I only filled 800 shares. I sold more at 94 and 90. Bailed out of that. Ended up not being the most impressive trade. That was just 7,500 shares. Nothing too exciting on that one.

Next one was XCO. This one, also not very exciting. You can see on AEZS, I only made 116 bucks. On XCO, I only made 145. My really one good trade today was on DFFN. XCO, I got in this as I saw it starting to pop up. I felt like I missed this first pop, but I was like this has potential. Yesterday, it squeezed into a circuit-breaker halt, so I got in at 75.

You can see right here, 73, 74, and 75. Whoops. 73, 74, and 75. It pops up to 70 … What was it? A high of 81. I put shares on the ask at 77. As soon as it popped up to 81, we say a 15,000 share or 10,000 share seller. As soon as I saw that, I was like I need to get out. I’m going to try to sell on the ask to get the best price. I put out the order. It doesn’t fill. At that point, I’m like, okay, I’ve got to start … I put out another order. It looks like I filled part of it. Then, I started hitting the bid and stopped out.

I accidentally shorted 100 shares at 74, which I covered at 69, so that was a little sloppy. Only made $145 on it. You can see here, this was the one-minute pull-back. It popped up, didn’t hold that level. I didn’t get in it earlier here, because I didn’t even see this really as something that was in play when it was down here. Once it popped up, hit my high-a-day scanner, I was like, okay, I’ll buy the first pull-back. Bought the first pull-back. It just didn’t happen to work very well on this trade.

Those were the three stocks I traded and the four trades of the day. Green on three out of four names. Like I said, finishing the week up, whatever, $4,500, something like that, $4,600. Decent trades. Decent day. It’s a good way to finish the week. I’ll be back at it first thing on Monday, and hopefully through next week, we’re able to see some solid momentum and I can rebuild from that little setback I had last week and get myself up towards $15,000 on the month, $20,000 in the month. Anything in that area would be respectable, and that would be nice. Even right now, at $9,000, that’s fine, but I would like to get a little higher than that.

As I said, that one red day really put a setback for me on the month. Frustration got the best of me, and I’m disappointed in that, but it’s part of the deal with trading. This is a very easy job in a lot of ways, but the one area where it can get challenging is the emotional stuff. I just got too aggressive, I got frustrated, and I ended up giving back some profit.

Now my job is to rebuilt the account one trade at a time, slow and steady. That’s it for now, and I will see you all later this afternoon. Some of you are going to be attending an afternoon webinar with me, so I’ll see you guys there, and the rest of you, I’ll see first thing on Monday morning. Okay, thanks, guys.

Oh, hey, I don’t see you there. I was just working on the dream board for my next home-run trade. Hopefully it comes soon. Until then, make sure you subscribe to get email alerts any time I go live or upload new videos. Until then, happy surfing.