+$2,929.99 on the last day of July! Wahoo!

All right, guys. Let’s go over our midday market recap for today. This is the last day of July. Finishing up another month here. Today is the 140th trading day of the year, which is exciting. That means we’ve got about 100 days left. I usually have right around 250, 251 trading days each year. I’m over here looking for my pen, so I can take notes on my trades for today, but I don’t seem to have one. That’s okay. I’ll write things down when I find my pen later.

Today is interesting because on the gap scanner, we didn’t have a lot that I was super, super interested in. Leading gapper that was within my price range was, on the tip of my tongue, NXTD. NXTD was our leading gapper. This one you can see here, pre-market. They had a nice little pre-market consolidation under 190. Looked decent, but the bell rang. I saw Sam who’s the moderator in the chatroom. He got in this right down here 175, anticipating the break of 180, pops up to a high of 184. Boom, locks up the profit and that was the easiest trade of the day on this one. It was not an easy one. He did a good job capitalizing on that one opportunity. It was definitely a stock that was likely to give you one or two opportunities and he got it. Good job to him on that one.

Right out of the gates, I was watching MYO. This was the first one I had on watch. You can see, again, pre-market flagging around $11, a little bit of a pull back. I was like “Okay, this looks decent for an opening range breakout”. I jumped in this at $10.50 with 2,000 shares, getting in for the break of the half dollar, thinking that this might quickly pop right up and retest $11. It popped up to $10.60 and then dropped to $9.60. I stopped out of that with the $407 loss. It took smaller size and stopped out quickly. I was like “Wow, that was ugly”.

Now, MYO was a recent IPO and these stocks are very volatile. They can be very volatile. They can move up a lot or they can move down a lot. You don’t always know which way they’re going to go especially when you get in at the apex point. When you get in at a breakout point and a breakout fails, it can turnaround really quickly. That was my first trade of the day and I went right into the red. I was like “Oh my God, is this going to be my third red day in a row? This is getting really frustrating. What is going on?” I saw NOVN hit the scanners. When I saw this hit the scanners, I thought, “Okay, well, this is a stock that I’ve traded in the past and I’ve done pretty well on it”.

You can see on the daily as it was curling up here, there was no upside resistance, really, at all and have lots of room up towards 11. When I looked at this, I thought, “Okay, this looks good. I like it, but there’s one problem”. The one problem is that it’s very light on volume. You can see here, we had this one-minute micro pullback. At this point where we have this one-minute micro pullback, I was like “This looks fantastic but there’s less than 100,000 shares of volume”.

I felt like with a stock that’s this light on volume, even though it had a lot of potential, it’s not fair for me to say “Okay, I’m buying the stock because there’s not enough liquidity for everyone to get into this trade”. I was like “You know what, I’m going to take this trade and I’m going to let other people in the room, if they see the setup because it’s obvious, let them take it as well but I’m not going to call it out and this will serve to be a test. Let’s see if you guys are able to see the setup and take the trade without me playing it out”.

I got in this here for the first one-minute [inaudible 04:25] make a new high. That was an entry just under $6. We popped up here to a high of $6.12. $6.12 and then we dropped right back to $5.83. For a moment, I was red on the trade and I thought, “Well, I’m just going to go further into the red today,” but then it popped up here to 24, squeezed up to 41 and then we had a little micro pullback here under 41. I’ll show you on the chart, a little pullback here under 41, and then boom, up to 55. I sold through 55. That move up to 55 and then on this consolidation here at 43. My average entry was just under $6 and my exit was $6.41. I made a total of $3,337 on that trade. That trade certainly put me back in the green finishing the day up here $2,929.99.

Now, this is the trade that was really pretty simple. It was a one-minute micro pullback right here out of the gates. Yes, the volume was light. Because the volume was light, it meant there was a little bit more risk but this stock had a few things going for it. It had a good float. It had a good daily chart. It had a history of being a former runner. The only thing it didn’t have was a good catalyst. That made me a little nervous. It was lacking a good catalyst (1), and (2) the volume was a little on the light side. I was a little hesitant getting in, but then we ended up getting a 50 cent move. This goes to show you that even though there are times where you might think, “Well, the stock is extended. It’s already up too much” or “There’s no catalyst,” or something like that.

Let’s see. Sorry guys. Let me know if you can hear the audio again. You should be able to hear it. Like I said, this goes to show that sometimes you might have light volume, sometimes you might have less than an ideal catalyst but if you jump in at places like half dollars and whole dollars and you’re able to manage your risk with relatively tight stops, you can do pretty well. I felt like I was managing my risk on this with a pretty tight stop because I was getting in at the very beginning of the move. Now, if I had waited for more volume to come in, I would’ve had to buy at that much of a higher price, and then my cost basis is higher and my risk is higher because the downside is that it goes back down to where it started from.

This was a decent trade. It gets me about $3,000 profit, which is a really nice way to finish the month. A month overall, for me, has been a bit on the slow side and has been riddled with a couple of really big red days where I got stubborn or I got frustrated and I let some of my emotions get the best of me, which is always disappointing when that happens, but it’s probably part of the reality of any trader. If a trader is able to completely 100% separate their emotions from trading, they’re doing an incredible job. Even me doing this for years and years, I’m still not always able to. I have some really good months and I have some more slower, frustrating months.

The one red month that I have this year was April. The interesting thing on April is that I was doing pretty well until I lost $12,000 in the last week. That’s ridiculous. I ended up going from up, $8,000 on the month to down $6,000. That’s just a silly thing to do at the very end of the month on the last two days of the month to get super aggressive and to throw away a decent amount of money being stubborn, but it happens.

My hope is that you guys are able to even, at times, see me as I’m in those states and recognize, “Okay, this is a trader who … Yeah, he’s really successful. He’s done a really good, but you can see, he’s getting emotional and hopefully he can learn something from that, both from the good and the bad”. The whole point of doing these recaps every single day is that we don’t brush the losses under the carpet. We talk about them.

Today is a good day. It’s green day. It’s a great end of the month of July, which as I said, hasn’t been the best month. I have a total of one, two, three, four red days in the month. Three of them were last week, which is really disappointing but three of them were last week. In total, those four red days amount to about $15,000 in losses. Now, I’ve talked about this before in the last few years of loss over $900,000 trading and I’ve made back $1.4 million or something like that, $1.5 million. If I tallied up every single loss I had this month, obviously, it’s going to sound like a big number. If I tallied up every single one of my winners, it’s going to sound like a big number, but we talk about what the net is.

It happens for me that on days that I’m red, my accuracy is usually really low like 33% or lower. The days when I’m red, I end up … That’s when all my losses are. They’re grouped together on the red days. The green days, typically, my accuracy is pretty good. I’ve got four out of five success. Accuracy, green on four out of five names or three out of four names. On those green days, there might be a loss here there.

Today, I have a $400,000 loss but generally, the big, big losses are on those red days and it’s when they have multiple big losses like back to back to back. That’s when the days get pretty nasty. I’ll finish this month, unfortunately, with less than $10,000 in profit but I am in the green. I suppose it’s a little disappointing because last June, I made $34,000. Last July, I made $32,000. Last August, I made $29,000. $96,000 in three months.

In June, I made 8 grand. Here in July, I’m probably up like 6 grand. It seems like very, very different from last summer. It just happens that momentum has been a little bit slower. I have to be able to be patient, sit on my hands, not force it. Forcing it is what cost me some money this month. I probably could’ve finished this month around $15,000 if I hadn’t gotten a little too aggressive but at the same time, getting aggressive is how I made $70,000 in January. I guess, right now, I’m maybe paying my dues for being that aggressive but that’s okay. Tomorrow is August 1st. I’ll finish up this week trading from California, enjoying the warm weather. It’s really warm here. Next week, I’ll be back on the East Coast.

Hopefully, we’ll have a good, strong month of August. I’ll do a little bit of momentum, a little bit of reversals. Just keep looking for the opportunities and stay focused on quality setups as much as I can. All right. That’s the game plan here. I hope you guys all had a decent morning. I’ll see you first thing tomorrow morning, 9:00 a.m. Okay. I’ll see you guys soon. Hey, I didn’t see you there. Well, I was just working on the dream board for my next home run trade. Hopefully, it comes soon. Until then, make sure you subscribe to get email alerts any time I go live or upload new videos. Until then, happy surfing.