Day 71 of the $583.15 Challenge +766.32

All right guys, so time for a midday market recap, we’ll go over the trades from today. We’re back from the long weekend and this was, for me, not an easy day at all. I feel like I started the day just on the wrong note. Anyways, let’s go over … I’ll show you the PNL here for this morning, just kind of big picture. Finishing the day up $766.52.

Those of you watching on Facebook Live can see that. Traded three stocks, lost 1,697 on CBLI. Made $12 on CNET and I made 2,924 on VIVE. My commissions, $92. ECN fees, $367. My realized gain before commissions is $1,238. Realized gain after commissions, $766.52. Obviously, I over-traded today. Traded just … I mean, I was just too aggressive and I’m not really super happy with my performance. Let’s kind of talk about why today was like that.

Well, today could have potentially been my third consecutive losing day. I lost money on, let’s see, Wednesday, and I lost money on Thursday, and then the market was closed on Friday. I had a four-day losing streak back in March, and in those four days I lost 15 grand, and then of course since then I’ve made back like 40 grand.

I’ve definitely recovered from it, but I did have four days, back-to-back losers that set me back, not just dollar-wise, but also confidence came down a little bit and just was feeling frustrated, emotionally kind of just beaten up a little bit by the market. Then, coming into today I knew that I had already had two red days last week and it was really important that today was a green day, that I break the streak and that I don’t go further into the red.

I mean, everyone wants to have green days all the time. The reality is we will have red days from time to time. It’s simply inevitable. This is part of trading. Not every day is going to be green. The important thing is that you’re able to manage and mitigate the risk, so your draw downs are as small as possible, but when you …

It only takes a momentary lapse in judgment to start to get emotional and overly-aggressive and next thing you know you’re holding 25,000 shares, or whatever it might be, on a C-quality position and you’re down a couple thousand bucks and you’re like, “Why did I do this? How did I even get here?” It happened so fast and it can be enough to blow up a small account, or give you a really big setback. That’s kind of something that I’m always mindful of.

For me, last week I did a fantastic job managing risk for seven days in a row. I had seven green days in March, the first seven days of the month I was green and then on the eighth day, I just had a momentary kind of setback and lost my focus and took a big loss as a result. This morning as I was coming into the market, I really wanted to have a green day and I felt the pressure of having two consecutive red days.

Now, something that I have the added pressure of is the fact that not only do I have two red days, I’ve got thousands of students watching me when I have these red days, watching me when I make mistakes. Of course, we’re all trying to learn and so it’s fine for them … It’s good for them to learn from my mistakes, but at the same time, I can’t help sometimes feel a little embarrassed that I make a mistake or that I have a losing day.

I had that added pressure this morning and then at 9:15, or no, it was 9am, I turn on my computer to pull up screen share and for some reason my screen share wasn’t working. I’m like, “All right. This is ridiculous.” I restart my computer and it decides to do a Windows update and the Windows update took 15 minutes. I’m like, “This is horrible timing.”

Finally the Windows update finishes and it’s like 9:15 and I load the computer, I get stuff up and running, and my screen share is still not working. I was like, “All right. I got to switch computers. Now I got to go use this computer.” Fortunately, I have backup computers, so I switched to this computer and I set up screen share, but it’s not the same because it’s not my typical system, it doesn’t have everything my other system has.

You can tell that type of experience can start to get you a little frustrated, a little frazzled, especially as you’re watching the clock ticking down to the open. That’s exactly how I was feeling. I had to get screen share running for our main chatroom, for all of our students logged in there, and then I had to get it running for the free chatroom. I was having problems with … Now I had to switch my headset to the backup computer, which wasn’t taking it and tried a couple of mics.

Finally, I get it all set up and literally I’m set up at like 9:28, so I’ve got like two minutes to the bell and fortunately I’d already done pre-market prep around 8:30, so I already knew the stocks I was watching, but I was coming into the start of this marathon like having overslept, type of thing, and you’re just like trying to grab everything together and it’s just not the right mindset. I was coming in feeling really frustrated.

Now, if I was a trader who didn’t have … Who wasn’t running a chatroom or anything like that, I wouldn’t have had to deal with any of that. If I wasn’t trading in front of thousands of people, I wouldn’t have to deal with the added pressure of, “Well, if I have a third red day, how’s that reflect on me?” These are kind of factors that seem to effect my trading that are sort of unique to me and they did effect my trading today.

I was feeling frustrated, I was feeling a lot more pressure, a lot more stress this morning, and on my very first trade I jumped into CBLI at $2.30. We’ll go back to CBLI here. Actually, it was $2.26. It was a great entry, it was really … It was a solid entry, but for some reason I only took 2,500 shares. I was a little bit more conservative with my position size, because I just wasn’t sure it was … I didn’t know if it was going to work.

Actually, maybe I took 3,000, but in any case, it was a relatively small position. I’m in at 25 and we pop up to a high of 50. I’m like, “Okay. This is good. This is looking really nice.” Then the next candle we drop all the way back down to 17. I didn’t take profit when it was up at 2.50, because I thought it was going to break over the whole dollar and continue higher.

I was like super agitated, just really frustrated that my first trade did this 30 cent pullback. It was a great trade, I just didn’t capitalize on it. Then all of a sudden, we squeeze back up to the highs right here. We go from 2.10 all the way up to 2.70. I mean, it was just out of nowhere. I’m was like, “All right. I’ll wait for the first micro-pullback,” which I do. We had this red candle, but that didn’t feel quite as solid. I waited for this candle. I got in on the next one right here at 2.63. We pop up to a high of 2.78 and then we drop all the way back down to 2.40.

I got filled at like 2.70. I got filled high, I got slippage. I’m in at 2.70 and then I stop out at like 2.45. I mean, it was just … I was like, “Super aggravating.” I could feel my kind of blood pressure rising. This one just was really, really choppy. Of course, I took 3,000 shares on the first trade and then just punched it for 10,000 on the second trade. I mean, that was kind of an overly-aggressive trade.

Then, it drops 20 cents, I’m down 2 grand just like that. I was down like 2,400 bucks on this one, or 2,200 bucks. It comes back up, I get in right here thinking that this is a decent five minute set up, making a breakout, and it drops again. Second trade on it, it does it to me twice in a row. I’ll show you guys on Facebook Live. I got stopped out on this candle here and then on this one right here. Two of the biggest red candles were the candle right before that, is where I got in.

I don’t know. For whatever reason this one just to me wasn’t playing nicely. My entries … I don’t know, it just wasn’t working. Now, over the last, I don’t know, 18 months or so, my accuracy has been right around 68, 70%. 68, 70% of the time I’m right. The trades I take work, but that leaves 30% of the time that I’m just wrong and this is part of that 30%.

Does it mean my strategy doesn’t work? No. I mean, the strategy works, it just on this particular stock it didn’t respond the way I expected it to. You always want to monitor your stats and get a sense of, “Okay, well am I still at 68%, or in the last month did I drop down to like 50, or 40, or something like that?” My stats have been pretty consistent, so I’m not going to say anything, or draw any big conclusions about this. It was just a stock that wasn’t easy to trade. It was just choppy.

I finally got back in at … I do end up going up to $3 and I got back in for a trade right here. We had this long consolidation and I jumped in 10,000 shares at 94 and we got this pop here up to a high of 3.09, which I was expecting we would break out of this one minute flag and we would go higher and that helped redeem some of the loss on that name and actually put me green on the day.

I think it was that trade that put me green on the day. Just not easy stuff on CBLI. Today right now we have 20 million shares of volume, so lots of volume, but just not an easy one to trade and that’s the way it is sometimes. Not necessarily anything that I did wrong on it, it just wasn’t easy to trade. That’s CBLI. Next one was CNET.

I jumped in to this one after my first trade, or second trade on CBLI. I got in for first five minute candle to make a new high. As you can see right here, we popped up, but we didn’t hold those levels. We got to a high of 73. My target was a move back to high a day and we ended up falling back down. Only made 12 bucks on that. Only got filled 1,400 shares also.

Then, VIVE was a big winner, but a higher risk trade that I think that if I hadn’t been so frustrated today I probably wouldn’t even have taken it at all. On this trade, this stock popped from 6.50 up to 7.66 and then got halted on five minute circuit breaker.

Halted on a circuit breaker and it resumes about five minutes later at 9.73. I was like, “Wow. Okay, this thing just gaped up two points.” It pulls back for a second and I was like, “Okay. It pulls back, as it comes back up through 9.73 that’s where I’ll enter and see if this does multiple circuit breaker halts in a row.” I mean, I don’t know … I wasn’t sure if there was news, I didn’t see any news, but I didn’t know. Obviously, this was a big move. I jumped in this at 9.80 for the break right here and then it doubled at $10 and we got this move here up to 10.81.

I was looking on this for a move up towards 11. We got a high of 11.16 and I was thinking potentially 11.50, maybe 12, we would get halted on another circuit breaker and then this could open another two points higher. I mean, you never know. That was kind of back of my mind target, but with an entry at 10 and a move up to 11, it was enough to capture 2,900 bucks, which was solid, but it very quickly rolled over and on my exit I sold at, let’s see, I sold at … Actually, I’m impressed, because I sold 750 shares at 11.16, which means I actually got the top.

That’s pretty rare that you get the top of a move, so that’s actually pretty impressive. I sold 750 shares at 11.16 and then I was selling at 10.71, 10.53, 10.21, so I’m getting slippage coming down. 10.11, 9.99, 9.81, 9.83, and 9.82. It was like, that was the challenge with this one. I wanted to sell into strength. I filled some into strength, but then the rest as it was coming back down.

It wasn’t the best trade, it was high risk. I think that trading stocks that come out of circuit breaker halts, this is the way I trade them. Well, two ways. One is the high before the halt, so if it opened at 7.50, I would’ve added over the high of this green candle, which was 7.66. If they open higher, I wait for a micro-pullback and an entry around a half dollar, or a whole dollar.

I got it on this one. It was just, I think that if I hadn’t been in the hole, I hadn’t been red on the day, I hadn’t felt so frazzled, I probably wouldn’t have been as aggressive on it and maybe I would’ve passed on it completely because I would’ve felt it wasn’t worth the risk. Today, just my mindset was to be more aggressive, because I was frustrated. The fact is, you can harness your aggression to help you trade better, you can.

Let’s say I happen to be aggressive the way I was today on a day when we had one of the biggest moves of the year, like DRYS from $50 to 80, or $100. On a day like that, that aggression could serve me really, really well. However, on a day when there’s nothing to trade, that aggression will just get you into bad set ups and you’ll lose money.

You have to learn how to be really honest with yourself and how to look at set ups through a clear lens. Not a lens that’s clouded by emotional frustration, external factors like, “I’m having a bad day, my computers being annoying,” or whatever it might be. If you can get to the point where you can hold yourself back, kind of allow yourself to be aggressive, but wait to take it out on the right stock, then you can … That’s kind of getting to the point where you’re really in control of your emotions.

For me, I’m still working on it and it’s something that I think we all struggle with. Even if you’ve had a period of time where you’re really good at tapering your risk and responding to your emotions in the market, you can still have a month later where circumstances are different and you react differently. It’s like this muscle that you constantly have to be strengthening and exercising.

Anyways, that’s the recap for today. Finishing the day 766 bucks, so green on the day, which is good on day 71, breaking the two-day red streak. Hopefully we can just kind of see a strong week, but today wasn’t the best indicator of that, because momentum was really choppy. Hopefully it bounces back, we see some good momentum through the week and into next week as we are in the second half of April. All right.

Also, final reminder tonight at midnight our Easter sales are ending. I’ll put up the screen here, you can see, coupon code Easter 30, we’ll give you a 30% discount on chatroom subscriptions, paper trading subscriptions, or trading courses. You can just enter the coupon code Easter 30 on the checkout page. We’d love to have you guys check us out. A

nyone who’s watching on Facebook Live, or on YouTube, and who isn’t in the community yet, this would be a great time to take us for a little test drive and join a team. All right. That’s it for today and I will see all of our students in class at 4pm.

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