Day 64 of the $583 Challenge +$1,231.70

 

All right, guys. We’re going start our midday market recap here. We’ll go over the trades from this morning. Overall, another kind of slow day for me, only $1,200 profit. Actually, $20, just $20. I guess it’s lower than yesterday. I think yesterday I was at 1,250 and today I’m at 1,231. Very similar days, just kind of smaller gains, but with my big $6,400 win on Monday that still puts me up now nearly $9,000 on the week, which is almost double what I made last week.

It goes to show that if you are patient and wait for A-quality set ups, and then you’re aggressive in the way you trade, then when they come along that you don’t need to trade a lot. You can be patient, you can sit tight, because those A-quality set ups will definitely tied you over during some of the slower market conditions.

You can see my PNL here, for those of you watching on Facebook. 1,231, 70 on two stocks, MSDI and TGC. Now, one of the bigger stocks today was CALI, C-A-L-I, and I ended up not trading it. I was watching it pre-market, but it didn’t really set up in a way that I felt I could manage risk on. I’ll look at … Well, I’ll show you the trades I took today and then we’ll look at CALI in a moment.

The trades I took, first one was MSDI. This one was on our gap scanner. It was gapping up and I was watching this for a break over 150, which was pre-market high. I jumped in MSDI at 145 in anticipation of the break of 150. We popped up to 160, then we pulled back to 138, so I went from being up 15 cents to down 7 cents.

Then on the next one minute candle as it popped up and broke over 160, up to 167, I took the profit. I was like, “You know what? I just went from being up 15 cents to down 7 cents. When it comes back up, I’m getting out.” That’s what I did, $737 with 5,000 shares. That was a quick trade, only lasted three minutes, didn’t really hold up as well as I’d hoped.

Then we had TGC, which was interesting because yesterday it was at 40 cents per share, and this morning it squeezed up from 80 cents up to a $1.20. It got halted on a circuit breaker at $1.20 and so I was watching for the resumption.

One of the ways that I trade these stocks out of circuit breaker halts is into and around whole dollars and half dollars. As this resumed trading, it resumed at … Let’s see. It opened at 125, dipped down to 120 and then it surged up. I jumped in with 10,000 shares as it broke over 130. My target was 150. It popped up to a high of 156, so I was actually up $2,000 on this for a second, and then it came back down.

In the next candle it came all the way down to 126, and in the third candle it went back up to 146. I got out with 5 3/4 cents profit, so $574 on 10,000 shares. With that, that was kind of … I mean, that was the end of my day, two trades. I was certainly hoping to have more opportunities, but those were the only two I took.

CALI, this one was on my radar pre-market, because I saw how we had this consolidation from … We had the move yesterday and then consolidation pre-market just under yesterday’s high. I was like, “I like the look of this over probably 350.” The bell rings and at first there wasn’t a lot of volume on it, it actually dipped down, so I was kind of like, “All right. Well, maybe it’s just choppy,” and then all of a sudden it did a red to green move and it surged up through 320, 340, and then up to a high of 367. I

was like, “Okay, well really strong, didn’t really give me a good one minute pullback, so instead I’m just going to sit tight and wait for the five minute set up.” Well, we kind of got this little five minute set up here at 359, which was this little consolidation on the one minute at 359, right around 945. I didn’t really trust it. I didn’t feel like it had consolidated long enough, and so instead I didn’t take the trade.

It ended up popping up to 183, so it would’ve been a good trade to take and at this point it just sort of started to get too extended for me to get in since I didn’t have a good entry from earlier in the day. Rolls over, sells off down to the 20 moving average consolidation.

Then, it opens back up. This was kind of an interesting set up the way it popped back up and then went all the way to high a day. It was really looking weak, didn’t look like it had the strength to go back to high a day, then all of a sudden back at high a day. I maybe could’ve taken a couple more trades on it or been more aggressive, but I didn’t really feel like I had the biggest cushion on the day and so I decided to play it safe.

I think that that was the right move today. Two trades, two winners, another $1,200 day. It puts me up $2,500 in the last two days and about $9,000 on the week with two days left.

Now, my track record right now is that I’m not trading very well on Fridays, so I’ll definitely scale back for my Friday trades, but we still have trades tomorrow and hopefully we’ll see something we can jump into.

If I see an A-quality set up, like the one I took on Monday, well I’ll jump in that and I might get a 2, 3, 4, $5,000 winner and then that is going to get me up above 10,000 on the week, maybe 12,000 or more. This still has the potential to be … I mean, it’s a great week right now, even if I don’t trade tomorrow or Friday.

Has the potential to be a fantastic week if I get one more A-quality set up. Odds are good that some time in the next three or four days I will see an A-quality set up that I can be aggressive on. The trick is that I need to be patient until that set up comes along. I can’t be overly aggressive on low quality set ups, because if I do that, I’m going to start giving up profit.

I can show you here just as kind of a little preview of what I’ll show you on Friday, these are my trader view stats for the year from January 1st through … I don’t know if … This didn’t include yesterday. January 1st through, I don’t know, Monday I guess it is. $111,000 in gains. Accuracy, 71%, so pretty solid accuracy. Average winners, 1,300 bucks per trade. Average losing trades, $1,200. Right around a 1:1 profit loss ratio.

This kind of goes to show that if I can be disciplined and keep my accuracy high, I could do really well, but those losses definitely cost me. If I go over to the overview you’ll see my equity curve, which is not the prettiest.

Let me do 90 days. All right, so you can see I went from obviously $0, or $586, squeezing up to 21,000. Then I have my worst day of the year where I lost, I think it was $7,000 in my small account and I lost 7,000 in my big account on that day, so $15,000 loss.

Then, moving back up. This is just the share trader challenge, or my $583 challenge. Moving back up to 55,000 and then I drop back down to 45,000. Then moving back up, 77,000, a little bit of a drop down. Moving back up to 101,000 and then back down to 87,000.

Then it took me like two weeks to get back up to 101, where I peaked out at the end of last week 110,000 and then I lost 5 grand on Friday. Made that back on Monday and now I’m up right around 100 … As of today, $112,900. You can kind of see this equity curve. It’s interesting how some of my biggest days were in February and early March.

I’m kind of waiting for that next 8 to $10,000 day, but in the meantime I can get by on 4 or $5,000 green days, or smaller days that are 1,000 or 2,000. I just have to be careful, because I know when I hit red days, they’re pretty consistently 4 or $5,000 losses. These are my red days this year, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, looks like 11.

11 red days so far this year. I’ll show you guys who are on Facebook, those are my green days versus red days and that’s my profit curve for the year. You can see some ups and downs, but obviously generally moving up, which is solid. I just have to be careful, because knowing that when I have a losing day it’s generally in the $5,000 range, I … That would give back 3 1/2 days like today.

If I’m going to grind on lower numbers, that’s fine, I just need to taper back my risk in general until I see really good A-quality set ups. One of the things I was saying last night in class and I’ve said over the last couple days is to kind of think of yourself as you’re out spear fishing and you’re waiting for that big fish to swim along and you know you’ve got one chance.

You’ve just got to strike and you’ve got to be completely accurate. That’s kind of like trading, you just sit and wait patiently for that A-quality set up and then when you see it, you just strike at it.

For me, this week so far I’ve taken, let’s see, two, four, six, eight, looks like ten trades. I haven’t traded really that much this week, ten trades in three days, an average of three trades a day. Pretty much, that’s typical for me. So far this year I’ve taken 185 trades and we’re on our 64th day of the year, so roughly three trades a day. I mean, that’s pretty consistent.

Three trades a day. Can you make a living trading just three times a day? The answer is yes, you can, absolutely. It’s about quality, not quantity. Look for A-quality set ups, get in, be aggressive and then get out. All right.

On Friday we’ll do a bit of a recap on the entire month of March, now that the month is closed and I have my broker statements in. Anyways, that will be coming up on Friday, but I just kind of wanted to give you a sneak preview of some of the things we’ll be talking about.

The important thing was also sort of to remind myself to take it easy on Thursday and Friday. It’s been a really good week, I don’t want to do something stupid. I don’t want another $5,000 losing day. I’d much rather have a day where I take zero trades, then to take a trades that’s high risk with big size and end up having a big setback.

Last Friday I got a little too aggressive, lost 5 grand, it was totally unnecessary, I was being emotional, I was being way too aggressive and that was a mistake and I paid for it. Fortunately, I was able to get myself … Make back those gains quickly.

I’m right back where I was, even higher, then last week, so that’s good. Quick rebound is always nice, but I want to strive to be a better trader and that means minimizing my draw down. Right now I would say that would mean minimizing my draw down.

My accuracy is really pretty solid. If I was looking at these stats of another student, I’d be like, “Look, your accuracy’s good. It’s 70%, that’s fantastic. I mean, I wouldn’t really ask for more than that, but your profit loss ratio is only so-so, because it’s really only about 1.1 to 1. $1,300 average winner for $1,200 average loser.”

I would say to this student if I saw these stats, “You need to tighten up your stops, so your losses are smaller. If you can do that, you’ll have smaller draw downs and you’ll have an equity curve that’s steeper, because you won’t have those big dips.”

That’s what I say to myself, that’s what I need to work on and as we come to the end of the week, Thursday and Friday, it’s especially important for me to remember that, given the fact that I don’t do very well on Fridays. In fact, for all of this year, this is pretty incredible, this is how much I’ve made on Fridays.

All of this year I’ve made $1,200 on Fridays in total gains. Mondays I’ve made 35,000, Tuesdays 23,000, Wednesday 26,000, Thursday about 25,000, and then there’s Friday where I have barely made anything. This obviously shows you that … I mean, it’s not that I haven’t made money, but the losses have been so big that I’ve given back most of the wins. I trade just as much.

This is the distribution of trades by day of the week. I trade the most on Thursdays. I trade the least on Fridays, but not by much. I simply have bigger losses and that’s the problem. If I go up here to win-loss days, I can show you that based on, let’s see, day of the week, those are the days I have the biggest losses, Fridays. Now, we’ll talk about this again in a couple days around Friday, but the reality is most companies are not putting out really good headlines on a Friday before the weekend.

The good headlines come out on Mondays, Tuesdays to Wednesdays, early in the week. That’s when you want to put news out on your company. I mean, that’s when traders are going to have time to react and you’re going to see some market action. Fridays, you’ve got less headlines, more chop, and I just have been over-trading and being too aggressive. I need to look at that metric and make an adjustment in my strategy.

Anyways, so that’s an important reminder coming to the end of the week for me and probably for some of you guys as well. I think that’ll pretty much wrap it up for today.

Finishing day 64, $1,200, puts me up about 9 grand on the week, 9 grand on the month and in this small account I’m up to, let’s see, tomorrow I’ll open over $114,000, versus, starting at 583 on January 1st. The last three weeks have been a little choppy, but it’s starting to open back up and hopefully go back, or make my way towards 125 and then 150. Okay, so that’s it for now. I’ll see you all first thing tomorrow morning.