Coast to Coast Trading Recap! + $1,136.09

 

What’s up everybody? All right, so back in California, yesterday was a travel day.

So, as you guys know, yesterday started the morning with a couple of good trades, made around $4,000 and then had to pack up and get ready to make my way back to the California office. I come out here as often as I can. Last time I was here was October, November, something like that.

Back here in January and yesterday I drive down to the airport, it’s like kind of snowing when I leave, it’s really gray. I fly out of Connecticut, drive about an hour down to Connecticut. Get to the airport, I’m there early so try to get some work done. Yesterday got my mid-day market recap uploaded from the airport. Actually got a lot of work done on the airplane, which is awesome. I love being able to be productive while I’m traveling, but I couldn’t help but spend some of the time thinking about how I missed that great opportunity yesterday.

It was that same kind of thing I was talking about, that frustration of wanting to not be too aggressive, because I didn’t want to spend the whole plane ride thinking about how I just lost $4,000, but then even though I made $4,000 I spent the plane ride asking myself, why I wasn’t more aggressive and why I missed that one opportunity. That’s the thing you sometimes just can never win, and I think we are all our own worst enemies sometimes when it comes to critiquing ourselves, and wanting to always do better, do better. Well, you know what, by putting that care out just a little further every single time it keeps me hungry and motivated to try and be a better trader.

So, about half way into the flight yesterday, 30,000 feet or whatever, I look down, and I sort of realized, “We’re really high up.” And for some reason that was the moment that I decided to be a little afraid of heights. And I thought to myself, “Yeah you’re high up, you’re in an airplane but that’s okay and also this is the worst time to be thinking about a fear of heights. This is absurd. You’re in an airplane. You need to stop thinking about that.” And so I spend the next hour or so trying to not think about being really high up and being afraid of heights. It wasn’t the best fight that I’ve ever had. I’m not the best flyer and yesterday was not my most impressive display. But fortunately I made it, I’m here in California, I traded this morning, had a great day. I’m ready to get settled in and have a really good week ahead of us.

Up early this morning, 5:30 a.m. And I got settled into the office. One of the things that I was very mindful of before I started trading was, I was feeling a little tired, I was feeling a little frustrated. I was feeling tired because I only slept a few hours. I was feeling frustrated because when I set up my travel and trading station nothing worked. My screen share wasn’t working, my YouTube feed wasn’t working, Facebook wasn’t working, nothing was working right. And it wasn’t until like 9:25 that I finally got things sort of up and running. And it was only sort of.

So, I really didn’t feel super prepared for the bell to ring. I ended up taking a trade right out of the gates, being a little too aggressive on it. I got myself into the red. And fortunately I was able to get out of the red into the green, finish the day up $1,100 and with that I’m like, “Okay I’m done. I’m not going to push my luck today. I’m going to be happy with green. I’m going to take the temperature of the market, recognize that it’s a little choppy, recognize that I’m a little tired. Come back tomorrow hopefully feeling refreshed and hopefully will see some better opportunities.”

Typically, we see the best opportunities early in the week. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. And the reason is because a lot of companies, they want to put out their PR’s their press releases early in the week because it gives investors and traders time to see it and buy up the stock. So, putting out news on Thursday or Friday oftentimes the news that comes out the end of the week is kind of bad news. So, it’s sort of hoping that investors over the long weekend or over the weekend whatever, sort of like, “Oh I guess maybe it’s not that bad.” And by Monday it’s kind of been brushed over. That’s one of the reasons we see really good opportunities early in the week. Thursday, Friday it’s hit or miss. Sometimes there’s great setups and other times it’s just slow.

Anyways, that’s kind of where I’m at right now. Just excited to be back in California, even though it’s not hot up here in Northern California, it’s definitely warmer than New England. I’m going to enjoy some relatively warmer weather. Anyways.

Let’s get into breaking down today’s mid-day market recap. And I’ll go over all the trades that I took this morning.

All right everybody. So, we’re going to break down our mid-day market recap here. Back in California and getting settled in. You guys can see my little office here. You guys in the chatroom can see the video in the bottom corner, Facebook you guys can see the bottom corner too. This is sort of a mismatch … I don’t know the right way to say that but, it’s a mismatch mismash of computers all in front of me. I put together my travel and trading station, but then when I sat down here I realized that I had left a trading system here that’s pretty much all setup, so I’ll give you guys a quick little.

Oops let’s see if I can give this enough slack for this guy. There we go.

So, I’ve got my main trading computer right here, my broker and my level two’s. Chatroom over on the side. I’ve got my one USB monitor to here, which is leaning up against a real monitor, but the thing is the real monitor it’s not synced up with my computer. I would have had to install the drivers and stuff like that. So, this is just leaning up against a real monitor, USB. This USB monitor is also leaning up against a real monitor, which is very silly. Then here’s my other computer. And then this is the computer over here running Facebook and actually running the screen share. And then back behind this monitor is my little mini monitor, which is leaning on it’s side because I didn’t have time to put it uprighgt. It doesn’t really matter. You got everything you need, it doesn’t have to be totally perfect. T’s enough to make $1,136.09 in the first 10 minutes of the day. So, green is good and I’m happy with that.

So, I’m working here in my office in California for three days. And then I’m going to be in hotels kind of driving around and exploring. So, if I was going to be here in this office for two weeks, I’d just go ahead and setup the HDMI’s and really get it up and running the way I like it, but for right now I’m just keeping it like this. So, this computer’s actually on top of another computer. So I’ve got four laptops all right here. This little mini keypad is not working. I have one at home, but I press these buttons to stream on YouTube, Facebook, chatroom and stuff like that. So, you guys should see me going trough TSA because it’s like laptop number one, laptop number two, laptop number three, USB monitor number one, USB monitor number two, power cord, 1, 2, and 3. That little tiny HDMI monitor back there. It’s exhausting is what it is.

Got settled in here, flew last night and this morning I once again asked myself kind of early in the day, “Whats’ my mental state?” And my mental state was, “I’m tired.” I’m a little bit crabby because I tried to plug everything in and monitors weren’t working, screen share wasn’t working. I wasn’t able to do my YouTube watch list this morning because YouTube wasn’t streaming. Nothing was working, and next thing I knew it was 9:25 and we’re five minutes away from the bell.

So, I just kind of quickly broke down the watch list, looking at the gap scanners, which is the same as what I do any other day. I just look at the gap scanner, the two leading gappers are sort of the ones I honed in on. That was AMRH. This one I jumped into … and I’ll move my broker screen over here for you guys to see. Why is it being stubborn? It’s not letting me drag it. Come on. Well, whatever. I guess we’re only getting it to here.

First trade was on AMRH and this was annoying because I … I’m going to have to drag this from the other monitor, for some reason I’m not able to do that the normal way. Anyways, I’ll just drag it here. Oh come on. This is crazy. It’s not letting me put it over there. All right. Hold on. Let me just scroll this up to the top and I’ll just hold it there so you guys can see.

All right. So, my first order on AMRH was to buy 3,000 shares at $10.02. Now that would have been an awesome entry. I then tried to buy at 11 because I didn’t get filed at $10. Didn’t get filled and ended up buying it at $12.90. So I bought it at $12.90, this was after the first halt and you know what happened? It dropped about $3 per share. It dropped from $12.90 all the way down in the bottom of this candle to $10.36. I was down over $4,000. And I said, “You know what.

I’m just going to wait for the first candle to make a new high.” First candle made a new high right here. I sold on the ask at $13.29, $13.49, and sold the rest on the bid at $12.50. Ended up turning a $4,500 loss into a $453 winner. So, I’m glad I didn’t panic but I am a little disappointed in myself that I kind of gave into FOMO and bought it as high as I did.

Now, the reason I bought it there is because I usually buy the first candle to break over the high of the halt. So, we got halted at whatever $13. It opened lower and as it squeezed up I’m usually a buyer at $13. Target is to sell potentially after the second circuit breaker halt. It squeezed up to a high of $13.50 but it just wasn’t as clean as I thought it would be. So, the setup made sense, it just dropped a lot more than I expected. It had that big pullback. So, a little disappointing there. Ended up getting myself into the green on it.

And the second trade of the day was TNDM, which I took off the high day momentum scanners long at $3.80 anticipating a test of $4, look we tapped $3.98 and then dropped all the way back down to $3.50.

So, only $682 on that. And so that put me up $1,136 on the day. You guys can see down here. And green is good. This obviously hurts my daily average. My daily average before today was $4,900 a day but today being day seven it goes all the way down to $4,300 a day, which if you ask me is simply pathetic. $5,000 a day, that’s the goal. No, I’m just kidding. $1,000 a day is good. $1,600 a day was my average for all of 2017, so if I can average $2,000 a day, $2,200 a day I’m going to be very happy with that. Because look, $2,000 a day times 250 trading days I’m looking at a half a million dollars of profit. And that would be an improvement over 2017.

That’s what I want to do, compare myself to myself. Be a better trader than I was last year, and I would say so far this year I’m pretty happy with the way I’m trading. My average winners are $0.18 per share. My average losers … that’s not that pretty, my average losers are actually $0.34 per share, and that’s because on the first day I had two really big loses. If I exclude the first day I have a 1/1 ratio. I had a day last week where I was up $9,000 on the day, lost $9,000 and then had to work my way back up to $9,000. So, I made $18,000 of profit that day and I lost $9,000 in loses. Finished with a net profit of $9,000, but it was very choppy.

I guess this year has been a little on the choppy side, but it’s easy to look back at it fondly when you’re sitting up over $30,000 on the month and it’s only seven days into the month, seven trading days. My account right now is at $365,000 so we’re 36% of the way to the million dollar challenge. Million dollar goal. You know hopefully if I have some really good trading we’ll get there by the end of this year. If things slow down a little bit we’ll get there in 2019, but $583 to a million dollars, it is possible.

At this point it’s not a matter of if I’ll make a million, it’s just a matter of when? Because all I have to do is keep trading, keep doing my thing. So, it’s just a question of how long it’ll take. Will it take my two years or will it take me two and a half years, or three years? In contrast to a lot of those guys out there that kind of try to market that, “You’ll make a million dollars in your first year of trading.” I don’t believe that that’s realistic, but I do believe it’s realistic to become very, very successful and potentially make millions of dollars trading the market over the course of a couple of years.

That’s about it for me today, only two trades to go over. A slow day. Now, there were a couple of opportunities that popped up mid-morning and I passed on them because I felt that I did not have a good enough profit cushion on the day to be aggressive. I’ll give myself a pat on the back for that because on another day where I might have felt a little more FOMO I would have kept trading. And what I would have done, is I would have risked giving back my daily goal of $1,000 ’cause a $1,000 is a really solid day.

And I say my daily goal is $1,000 because I consistently exceed that. $1,600 a day average in 2017. I could probably say at this point my daily goal is $1,500 or my daily goal is $2,000, but then I’m going to have days like today where I’m below the daily goal. What would the smart thing for me to do today have been? Should I have kept trading even though I was up only a $1,000 and I had a really close call? Or should I have said, “Whoa. That was a close call, markets a little choppy today I’m going to step back. And maybe tomorrow will be better.” And I think the second is the better choice. When things are a little choppy I think it’s just better to step back, slow down, so I’m glad that I did that today.

Fernando, yeah you’re thinking step back is the right move so is David. I think that’s the right move. I think you put the pedal to the metal when things are hot, and you seek shelter from the storm when things are choppy.

So, let’s bring it back to the Deadliest Catch analogy. Those guys on the Deadliest Catch, one of my favorite reality TV shows. They during really bad weather, they’ll often try to kind of take shelter. They’ll either go into port and just park in the harbor or whatever you’d call it, anchor up in the harbor. Or they’ll sometimes anchor behind the big sort of islands so they’re protected from the wind. And there are some guys who will try to fish through the really bad weather. And what often you see happens is they have equipment failures, they risk injury of the crew, it’s wear and tear. At the end of the day they’re not as productive because the weather is just so high that they can’t catch a lot of crab, their hourly rates are just really low. In contrast when they’ve got really good weather conditions you’ll see them just pedal to the metal. They’ll do like a 40 hour streak. They’ll just keep going, and going, and going to try to really take advantage of that good weather.

And so, with trading when we have hot trading I try to really take advantage by being more aggressive. Putting the pedal to the metal, trading with bigger size, trying to capitalize on the opportunity because I know there will be bad weather ahead. I don’t know if it’s a day from now, a week from now, or a month from now, but I know there will be a point where the smart thing to do is to seek shelter from the storm and to not trade. Because if I go out there and try to fight this bad weather, this choppy market, I’m going to lose money. It’s going to cost me. Right now at the beginning of the year is definitely about building the cushion, especially just statistically January, February, March and April. Build a cushion because June, July, and August sometimes are a bit slower. And then things pick up again in the fall.

Right now that’s kind of the frame of mind that I’m in. We think of the Spring and January, February, March and then into the Spring being a strong time of year, I have to take the temperature of the market every single day. Today I kind of had a close call and I said, “You know what I’m maybe not in the best head space. I’m a little tired. I’m just going to slow it down. Things seem a little choppy out there.” And I think that, that was the right call.

You know this LEDS … BMRA was the other one that popped up. And the thing with BMRA it was a good five minute setup. Look at this five minute flag. I say it was good because it worked out well. It was only so-so because it actually pulled back a lot. It pulled back all the way down here to $9.55. At $9.55 all the way down here to $6. It broke below the VWAP and then it squeezed up. So, we missed the squeeze. We saw it after it was resuming from the halt. And you know, it was already up here at like $8.75. I had an order at $8.75 thinking about getting in, I hesitated and it was probably the right move because it only hit $9.32 before it dropped way back down. And if I had, had a really great day and I had a big cushion, yeah maybe I would have been more aggressive and whatever. You know green is good.

So, another green day. So we’ll write that down in the calendar. I brought it with me, it’s over in my bag so write it down, seventh trading day of the year, another green day. So, I’m green right now six out of seven days. I was red the first day of the year, which is a little disappointing. I’ve redeemed myself from that $3,000 or $4,000 loss and I’m up $30,000 on the month. So, green is good.

Anyways, that’s it for me. Tomorrow I’ll be back on 9:00, 9:15 streaming on YouTube for the pre-market watch list. And then of course live trading 9:30, 10:30, 11:00. Mid-day recap probably around 11:00 a.m. we’ll do it on the early side just ’cause I’ve got so much stuff going on out here for the next few days.

All right. So, hope you guys all had a great day. Any questions any feedback you guys want to throw in the comments on YouTube. I’ll come back and answer those. Those of you in the chatroom, questions I’ll answer those as well.

LEDS yeah the spreads on this one make it a little tricky. You sort of notice traders will get really aggressive and then they’ll kind of slow down. Kodak yesterday a really big move. I didn’t end up trading it in the afternoon ’cause obviously I wasn’t around. It’s a five cent tick stock, didn’t really give us continuation today. So, nothing there.

Mike he’s flying out to California. He’s going to be here later today. We’ll be trading together in the morning tomorrow. All right. Yep high day scanners scrolled up and I’ll leave you guys to it.

I’ll see all you first thing back here tomorrow morning for pre-market analysis around 9:00, 9:15.

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.