Day 74 of the $583.15 Challenge -$2.9k

What’s up everyone? All right, so we’re going to do our mid-day market recap, go over the trades from today. This is another choppy day in the market, which is frustrating to say the least. It’s very interesting the way we go through these hot streaks and cold streaks. It’s one of the things that certainly keeps our work as traders interesting because days can just be so different. I can have a day where I make $22,000 and that makes for an incredible month, and then I can have six days in a row where I’m just dealing with chop. That’s what I’m dealing with right now.

I had, in March, a $15,000 red streak where I lost 15 grand over five days, and then I made back about 40 grand. Well, now in the last six days, I’ve given back about 14,000. It’s like I took from up to 110K down 15 grand, back up towards 130, and now stepping back 14. As long as you’re stair stepping up, that’s the good thing. Obviously, we’re all going to have times where the stair step is a period of sideways or even a little bit downtrend, but that’s part of trading.

I want to remind you guys before we jump into the recap that at 1:00 PM, in an hour, 1:00 PM today, I’m going to be hosting a webinar and you guys can register. If you go to warriortrading.com, you’ll see the links probably in the top menu, the top header, whatever, to register for our webinar. During this webinar, I’m going to talk about the one strategy that I used to take a $583 account and turn it into 100K in 44 days. Make sure you log in.

During the webinar, I’m going to be giving away two webinar exclusives. The first will be a free copy of my bestselling book, retails on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. I’m going to give you a link to download it at the end of the webinar. The second is I’m going to be giving away over $11,000 in trading bonuses, scanners, mentor sessions, classes, and tools. Make sure you register, you show up, and see if you have the opportunity to get some of those bonuses.

With that, let’s see. Why don’t we jump in here to our mid-day market recap? Here we are. As I said, day seven, what is it, day 74, I think. Definitely feeling some frustration as a trader just because it’s almost been comical how difficult the market has been for traders. It’s just been very, very choppy. Today, one of the trades I took, I got in, I took 10,000 shares, I was up 20 cents, I was up 2 grand. I was like, “This looks good. Very nice. It’s probably going to continue higher,” so I held it and I was thinking it would break over this particular break out spot.

I’d go up to being up 2500, 3 grand, maybe it would go up to 5.50, I’d be up 4 grand, 5 grand, 6 grand and all the sudden, it dropped 40 cents and I lost $4000. I went from being up 2 grand to being down 2 grand. I gave up $2000 of profit and went 2000 in the hole. It was just like, “This is ridiculous.” I don’t even know what to say. I did everything right. I didn’t sell too soon. I held it looking for the bigger move, and it just got rejected so hard. We’ve seen that quite a lot lately. I almost feel like right now the market barely even deserves my money or my order flow because it’s just so choppy.

If we look at the trades from today, let’s see, let me pull up the … It’s not market makers. It’s retail traders. I really don’t think it’s market makers. I think it’s retail traders. Let’s see. Let me show you my P&L today. Here, let me just drag this up. Finishing the day down 2900 bucks which is obviously annoying more than anything. The monetary is what it is. It’s not that big of a deal. It’s just frustrating to step up to the plate and then get slammed back down day after day after day.

Finishing the day down 2900 bucks, the four stocks I traded today, you can see my accuracy. Typical of a red day, accuracy is 25%. Four stocks I traded and I’m only green on one of them, so basically just everything I was looking at didn’t work. Let’s look at the trades I took. Well, the first one was IMNP and this one was gapping up like 90%. This is the thing that’s been really, really frustrating lately. The moves have been pre-market. I don’t like trading pre-market, I never have, but lately the moves have been pre-market.

IMNP had the first pullback pre-market at 3.91. From 3.91, it went up to 4.31. Then it pulled back, second pullback from 4.10, popped up to 4.50. That just kind of continued higher. Right out of the gates, we squeezed. I was able to take a scalp and make $60 but I didn’t trust being any more aggressive on it than that. Then as soon as the bell rings, we have one, two, three, four, five, six consecutive red candles. It just fades, so the whole move was pre-market.

For traders that don’t like trading pre-market, there wasn’t much opportunity. Now, if we look yesterday, just freaking [inaudible 00:05:56] and SNGX. SNGX, pre-market, it popped up, it pulled back. We had the first pullback pre-market so we squeezed into the open and then the second pullback right here which was after the bell rang, that was good. Third pullback was a false breakout and it got rejected really hard right here. See that? False breakout. First candle to make a new high, and then it dropped like 50 cents or almost, even more than that, so very sloppy.

CBLI, this stock is definitely the bane of my existence right now because I’ve lost on almost every single trade I’ve taken on it. It’s been ridiculous. We have the first day where it squeezed up pre-market and we had the first pullback and the second pullback pre-market. The bell rings, it pops up, and then gets rejected really quickly. Then all of a sudden, surges right back up to 2.80. It pulls back, I get in for the first pullback and then we get this huge red candle.

It’s looking good, looking like it’s going to retest the high, and then boom, it drops from 2.80 all the way down to 2.35. Then that happened, let’s see, that happened there and it happened again here through this consolidation. It just suddenly dropped, so this is a stock where you just didn’t see clean follow through. There are really no clean [bull 00:07:21] flags, no clean patterns. Clean patterns didn’t exist.

Yesterday, let’s see, the next day it sold off. Just it was very, very weak. Then yesterday, all the sudden out of nowhere, it pops up and goes from 3.50 up to 5.50. It was relatively clean, which was so surprising to me because the daily didn’t look very good. It was relatively clean, so this morning, I saw it popping up and I was like, “Okay, I will jump in this for the first five minute candle to make a new high,” which was right here.

Along the 4.95, 10,000 shares, it pops up to 5.15. I’m up 2000 bucks. I’m looking for it to break 5.20 and then after 5.20, 5.50. Then I wanted to see it break previous day’s high, which was 5.55. Then all of a sudden, it goes from 4.15 all the way down … From 5.15 all the way down to 4.55. It just, total false breakout. Highest volume of the day was on this red candle.

This was the cup formation. This was sort of the handle. I was waiting for that consolidation, first candle to make a new high, but you can see, big red candle. A big green candle, big red candle. Big green candle, big red candle. This was just a very choppy stock. This is not the cleanest stuff. All you see is first big green, then big red, then big green, then big red. Then that red candle where I got stopped out, so on that candle, I went from being up green and then all of a sudden way back down.

SAEX, another one that I traded today, and another one that gave just a really brutal false breakout. First I was watching it right here on the one minute, and I saw this one minute candle make a new high, and we popped up from 5.92 up to 5.98, and then dropped all the way down to 5.73, so it’s just like a total rejection. Up and then back down, and then it came back up and I was like, “Okay. I’ll buy the first candle to make a new high,” which was right here. I got in at 6.28, we pop up to a high of 6.50, and I was like, “That looks good. I’m up 20 cents.” Then we drop all the way down to 5.80. We dropped 50 cents, just again a total rejection. Lost 500 bucks on it, so just really not clean.

SNGX, traded this one today as well. Same kind of story. We had the halt. I got in after the halt looking for the move higher over $4. I got in at 4, it pops to 4.18. I got back in right through here and ended up stopping out and giving back the profit I had. Now, this is just the market that we’re in right now, so like I said, between my last two red streaks, my red streak in March I gave back like 15 grand over the course of four days. Then after that, I made back about $40,000, so made back the losses, plus 25 grand.

Then here, I just pulled back about 15 grand over the last six days. In the last six days, I’ve had four red days and two green days. My two green days were both only a couple hundred bucks, less than a thousand. In these conditions, yeah, I would be better off just scalping the move, taking that 10 cents when I had it, but it’s just for some reason hard for me to do that when I’m used to getting in these setups and seeing a bigger move and a bigger extension.

Now, NADL was a stock that was fairly strong this morning. The first pullback got bought up really nicely on this one, right here at 2.46 and it went all the way up to $3. Why this one was so clean and the other ones weren’t, I really just have no idea. When I looked at this, I thought, “Well, we’ve got the 200 moving average here at 3.08. I think that might be a problem.” I wouldn’t have been against buying it right here. I just wasn’t looking at it at the time. At the time, you had whatever, a couple candles of pullback, I just didn’t see it.

I think one of the reasons I may not have noticed it is because the float is a little higher. It’s a 25 million share float, I think. Whatever, 25 million share float. It ends up popping up. It hits a high of 3.05 and then pulls back. Let me reset my connection here. It pulls back, the first candle to make a new high is from 3, goes up to 3.24. Then in this one candle, drops all the way down to 2.91, so this was a good setup. I just didn’t see it, and I’m surprised it worked as well as it did.

Usually, the stocks that give us that really good extended resolution like 20, 30% are lower float stocks. They’re not usually in the 20, 30 million share float share range, but this one worked out better than I expected. I know some of you guys traded it and did well on it, and that was obviously really solid. I think the things that this one had going for it is that unlike IMNP, it wasn’t super crowded by the time the bell rang. It had some volume, but not a lot. It just had a clear pattern. It just ended up working out a little bit better, first pullback and second pullback.

Those are the things to look at, the first pullback and the second pullback. You can see on both of these, that ended up working. That’s the pattern that I trade. That’s the pattern that allowed me to grow a $500 account to 100 grand. The trades that I took on SAEX, that was the same pattern except on the one minute time frame which usually works pretty well. You can see right here, the pop up, the pullback, first candle to make a new high.

The trade on CBLI was a [bull 00:13:29] flag, but because these two candles were so red, it was definitely a little [iffier 00:13:35], but I thought because it made such a big move yesterday that it might do it again today. That’s really what I thought. I was like, “Well, yesterday I kind of wrote it off as being not worth it. It ended up really doing well, so maybe I shouldn’t underestimate it today.” Then of course today, it was like this, so it’s just the luck of the draw. This was not the cleanest pattern, it wasn’t, so if you had a pattern quality meter, this would probably be like a five out of ten or maybe even a four out of ten, so not as good there.

SNGX, this was a high risk trade buying it out of the halt at 4. It worked and I made money on the spike up to 4.18, but I got back in for the second break of 4 and stopped out as it came down to 3.80, or 3.90 or something like that. That was me being a little bit aggressive, which again, that works often. It just didn’t work on this trade and maybe today wasn’t the day that I should’ve been as aggressive. I’m continuing to trade more aggressively than maybe I should and I probably could’ve minimized the draw down today by trading with smaller size or not trading that kind of weak setup.

This is the area where I think that I probably struggle the most is, it’s hard for me to feel like it’s even worth trading if I’m not trading with big size. I just feel like it’s not worth it, so that’s kind of how I feel. I might as well not trade if I’m going to trade with like 1000 shares because making 100 bucks or 200 bucks is irrelevant. I come into the market and I want to make 2 or 3 or $4000 so that means taking bigger size. Unfortunately, it also means that there are some days where you simply should not trade at all.

I’ve never been good at that. I’ve never been good at coming into the market and not taking a trade. I almost never do that, but the reality is, there’s not an A quality setup every single day. It just is impossible. Today is a day where maybe there was one and I missed it, so after I missed that one opportunity, from that point forward, there just wasn’t, there weren’t any opportunities, or maybe there was two. This is true, that when I trade with a small account, I had a very different mentality. I was trading with small size and I was just trying to make $100 here and $100 there.

That was in the first few weeks, the first maybe two and a half weeks, and then I started scaling up my size and I was trying to make 1000 to $2000 a day. Obviously I did that very successfully for 44 days. I was able to get a really nice hot streak, I made 100 grand, but since then, I hit 100K on day 44, and since then it’s been definitely a little bit choppy. Maybe I would be better off resetting my account to $500 or, I don’t know, 25,000 or something like that, trading with smaller size, just switching things up, but I don’t think that that’s really … I don’t know.

Maybe there’s a couple issues. One is the mentality that I have has changed. I’m being a little bit too aggressive. Number two, my account is on the bigger side so I can afford to lose 2 grand or 3 grand. It’s not a big deal. I don’t know. There’s probably a few variables. Number three, the market simply isn’t as strong as it was in February. Doing the same thing as I was doing in February isn’t working as well, but I think it’s just a matter of time before we get some good quality setups and I’m able to have some of the 5, 6, $10,000 days again. It’s just kind of being able to weather through the storm without giving back too much profit that’s kind of the hard thing. I need to work on getting a little bit better at that.

In any case, this is where we’re at today. Day 74, another red day. Tomorrow is Friday. I have no hope for Friday. I really have no expectation of having a big day tomorrow. My goal tomorrow would be to be green. If I make 100 bucks, that’s fine. I’m not going to … It’s Friday, so then we’ll be back on Monday and I can kind of get back into the driver’s seat and hopefully find some good setups. If we continue to see these type of things in the market, like IDXG, where most of the move was pre-market and then the bell rings, it ends up being kind of choppy, and then suddenly squeezing up … I was so frustrated on this stock because I got in right here.

First five minute candle to make a new high at 4.25, we popped up to 4.34. Again I was up 10 cents. Then we dropped to $3. What is this? I just … It’s just crazy, but as a long biased trader, I look at this and I’m like, “This is just crazy. This is brutal. It doesn’t make any sense.” Of course, a short biased trader would be saying the same thing on stocks like VIVE, for instance. The other day, this thing went from $7 to $10, so it squeezed up, got halted, opened higher. I made 3 grand on it. It wasn’t the best trade ever, but from $7 to 11 isn’t bad.

How about KBSf, the day that it went from back here? This one went from $5 to 11. Those traders are shorting these moves and they’re like, “This is ridiculous. It doesn’t make sense.” They’re saying the same thing that I’m saying. It’s just, right now they seem to be dominating the market. That’s fine. Let them have their turn. We’ll get back to it hopefully in a couple days or whatever it is when we start to get better headlines. It’s the strong headlines that’ll drive the market and create those multiple-day momentum stocks.

Right now, we’ve just got to sit tight. If you’re a short biased trader, you’re probably doing pretty well right now, but you’ll probably be struggling a little bit to find shares available to short on a lot of these stocks because they are really hard to find borrows of, so you’d most likely need a couple of accounts at different places. That means you probably need 75 to 100 grand in capital in order to trade, to be able to have active accounts at multiple firms and be able to find shares to short. That becomes something that is really going to be more difficult.

I did the $500 to $100,000 challenge, and that was a lot of fun and now I’m just continuing to grow that account. It’s been slower growth in the last month but this will hopefully just be a little bit of a lull in the P&L and then get ready for a strong summer. Last summer, I made 100 grand in three months between June, July, and August so hopefully we have another strong summer and I’ll just power out of this little dry spell.

All right, so that’s it for now, mid-day market recap and I will see you guys. We’re going to have a 1 PM webinar, so I’ll see you at the 1 PM webinar. Students, we’re not going to have class today at 4 PM. The last class was yesterday so no class today at 4. All right, that’s it for now. I’ll see you guys at 1.