What’s up everyone? All right, so here we are finishing the 47th day of the year? Yeah, 47th day, up $5,233. Now, today is the best day so far of the month, which is awesome. Yesterday I went out and did something a little crazy, I bought a red sweatshirt. Now, you guys know that I get a little superstitious about colors. My superstition is that if I wear red I’ll have a red day, so I don’t wear bright red shirts when I’m trading.

I bought this bright red sweatshirt yesterday, and I wore it when I was driving around, and I was like, “This sweatshirt’s great. It’s comfortable, looks good on me, I love it.” I had it, I was going to wear it this morning. I put it on, I look at the gap scanner and I see RKDA at 55, and I was like, “I’m taking this thing off, I’m not wearing it. I can’t risk that I’m going to take a trade on RKDA because God, I could lose five, six, $7,000. I’m taking it off.”

I took the sweatshirt off and I decided to put on this shirt, which has a little bit of red. I’m dipping my toe in the water, just a little bit of red today, and ended up having a great day. So I kept the sweatshirt nearby, and maybe tomorrow I’ll trade with it on my lap and see how my trading goes. And then maybe draped over my shoulders. And then maybe actually wearing it next week, I’ve got to go slow. I can’t push it right now, I just need to stay slow and steady building up this month. But this was the day I needed. Last day trading from California. I’m going to upload this recap and then drive to the airport, fly home. I’ll be trading back from my home office tomorrow morning.

Anyways, a really solid day today, nine trades, eight winners, accuracy on-point, really good follow through, $5,000 in the first hour. That’s the day I needed. All right, so let’s break it down in today’s Midday Market Recap.

All right everyone, so we’re going to breakdown our trades from this morning. Today was best day of the month, which is awesome. $5,233.07, 47th day of the year, puts me up right around close to 10,000 on the week. Weeks like that are just great. Monday I made 4,400, Tuesday I lost $310, not a big deal. Wednesday I made 992, Thursday, 5,233, and I’ve still got Friday. It kind of goes to show, this strategy that I’ve had this month of saying, “If I’m not seeing good follow through right away, just stop trading. Even if I’m only up 1,000 bucks, or even if I’m down 300. I don’t need to keep trading until I hit my max loss, I can just walk away. So, Zen level of trading, that’s what I’ve been joking about.

But that’s what I’m trying to embrace this month. It’s not anything different from what I did last year in May after having a red month in April, or last year in October after having a red month in September. After you have a red month, it’s kind of this humbling experience where you’re like, “Okay, I need to step back, I need to slow down, I need to adjust a little bit. I’ve been too aggressive.” So this decision to trade a little more conservatively, not push as hard, to really kind of have my hand in the pulse of the market, has been I think a really good decision and a nice step forward for me.

This morning, initially I actually wasn’t sure this was going to be a really great day, because my first trades … And I’ll drag over my broker here so you can see. My first trades were on LBCC and CHFS, and I only made a total of like 360 bucks on those two trades. I took three trades and made $360, not a lot of profit, right? It’s not a very big winner. SMRT, I jumped into and made $900, or I made 700 and then I gave back 500. I went from being up exactly $1,000 with these trades, to up only 500. That’s when I was kind of like, “All right, you know what? Maybe I should just take the 500 and be done with it.” And then we had DXR. DXR is a stock that we’ve traded a couple times over the last week or so, so I was watching it. Let’s see, it was right in here I believe. It started to open up, let me scroll back here. I’m losing my place.

So, you can see a lot of trades today, a lot of executions, commissions will be higher. 82 tickets, 144,000 shares traded. I definitely churned commissions, but today was a good day to do it. That’s the important thing, to do it on a day when you’re actually going to make some headway. DXR, my first entry was at 10.38, 10.45, selling at 10.75 and 10.93. So that was my first scalp, and that was right here in this little consolidation. And then I, let’s see, sold through 11. I got back in at 11.50 and sold through, let’s see, back in at 11.50, back in at 11.68, selling through I guess 11.95, and then 11.75. At this final entry at 11.68, that was at 10.11, so that was right here.

What I was seeing on this was the stock’s starting to open up and I was like, “I’m just going to jump in this and I’m going to set my stop at my average cost, which is 11.68. And I’m going to hold it, and maybe this stock will to $15, $16. I’m just going to hold from that cost basis. But I will stop out break even. It squeezed up to a high of 12.84 and I was up $1,000, I was up a full dollar per share, but I didn’t sell it, I didn’t take the profit because I thought, “No, I want to give this room.” Unfortunately it did come back down and stop me out. I booked 2,900 on it and gave up that $3,000 of profit because I was holding for the bigger move. But then consolidated, opened up here, I took a small scalp in this area, made like 200, 300 bucks. It ended up hitting a high of 14.74, and now you can see it’s starting to curl up again.

At this time of day though, I’m past my trading hours. I’m not going to push my luck, I’ve got to leave here in actually like 40 minutes to fly home. I’m just saying, $5,000 is good, I don’t need to push my luck. But I kind of tried to take this approach of taking a position and holding it with a stop basically at break even, and seeing, “Hey, maybe it’ll go up three, four, five points, and I can just hold it.” Unfortunately that didn’t work, which is a bummer because here it is up three points from that price. But it dropped down to a low of 11.40, and I wouldn’t have wanted to let it go into a loser, because that’s not a good decision.

Yeah, a little trade on DXR, a couple little trades on that one. Then once we were seeing the momentum picking up, I took a scalp on RXII on this … No sorry, it was a one minute pullback at 5.68, so that was right in here. We have this little pullback after the fresh breakout. I missed the fresh breakout at 5.20, so I got in at 5.68, sold on the move here up to 6.20, or 6.15, which was a good trade. AQB, a little scalp on that, 650 bucks, in at the half dollar of 3.50. It topped out at 3.65, didn’t hold up super, super well. But another decent win. That’s pretty much it. Not a lot to go over today, the trades were fairly straightforward.

RKDA, I didn’t touch it, and I’m glad that it didn’t really tempt me. I mean, I was tempted pre-market because I was like, “Oh, this thing’s going to go crazy. What if it goes to 100 like the other one and the other one?” But I didn’t take the trade and that was a good decision, so I’m happy that I just steered clear of that one. And DXR, a little over my $10 price. I mean, I prefer to trade stocks between three and six or seven dollars, but we’ve been seeing good action in this $10 to $20 price range. ADAP is another one that has been strong today from 10 all the way up to $13. This one doing really clean five minute pullbacks.

One of the things I say with these is to focus more on the five minute setups, because buying breakout points, one of the challenges with buying breakouts is that you’re buying very close to high of day, anticipating a squeeze through the highs. So you’re buying high with the intention of selling higher, and that works. Obviously $600,000 in the last two years proves that it works. But the problem with it, and where it doesn’t work, is when you have stocks that have big spreads. Because if you’re buying the breakout point, and it’s a false breakout, you have a big seller right there or whatever, something happens, then immediately it rejects with the big spreads, plus it dropping fast, you can lose a lot. So buying breakouts on large caps typically doesn’t work very well.

On large cap stocks, buying support levels often works a little bit better. You buy support and sell into resistance, rather than buying those resistance breakouts. That’s the thing that’s a little tough with these ones, because when I get in … Let’s say I bought this at the first candle to make a new high here was 11.27. All right, well, it pops up to 11.68, which is 30 cents of profit, then it comes all the way back down to 11.27 on this candle 10 minutes later. You’re not really positioned to take a trade and just hold it with a stop at break even because there’s a very good chance you will get stopped out at break even. When you’re up 15, 20 cents, you’ve got to take it.

And that’s really challenging, because when we have these stocks like RKDA, or DXR, or even ADAP that go several points you’re like, “Why did I sell it for 20 cents?” But you did that because you bought a breakout. And when you buy a breakout setup and it squeezes 20, 30 cents, you almost always want to take profit because you know there’s such a high likelihood that it can retrace the move. Now, on DXR, I held that final 1,000 shares with an 11.68 average because I was up, at one point, a full dollar per share. And 11.68, I felt like at that point, once it was at 12.25, 12.30, 12.40, 12.50, for it to go all the way to 11.68 would be a really big retracement. So I felt pretty strong that I could hold it with a stop at break even, and that we would probably see pretty good follow through. And my stop at that point was so far away that I just thought it would work. And again, unfortunately it came down, stopped me out, and then it did pop back up.

I was trying to apply a little bit of that, just set the stop and let it work, because I was in at such a good cost basis, I had such a good average price. But it wasn’t good enough. Really, I needed an average price more like, well, I don’t know, lower. I mean, 11.68 was too high. Anyways, just some food for thought on that. And it’s fine, you buy breakouts, you sell when you’re up 15, 20 cents, and you do it again, you do it again, you do it again. And yeah, sometimes you’ll have a stock like DXT where you buy the breakout at 11.68, it pops up to 12.84, and you sell it for a full dollar per share, which I could’ve done. But with only 1,000 shares it would’ve only been 1,000 bucks, so it wouldn’t have been a huge winner.

That’s where it was smaller size, I was going for the bigger winner, two, three, four points potentially. Anyways, that’s about it for me today. I’m going to get my stuff packed up and head back east. But it’s been a great week here in California. $10,000 pays for the trip, so that’s nice. And yeah, it’s just been a great week, getting a little bit of sunshine and getting some work done. I’ll be back home tomorrow and be back to the regular routine on eastern standard time. All right, so that’s it for me, I’ll see all you guys back here first thing tomorrow morning and we’ll do our pre-market analysis between 9:00-9:15. All right, I’ll see you guys in the morning.

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