Friday, June 12, 2009

Wipeout

During the 12 day span from May 22nd through June 9, I had 37 consecutive winning daytrades. The losing trade finally arrived at the EOD on June 9. I was pretty psyched to have had this run scalping the QQQQ's for about $0.03/share profit. But the way I was playing it, suggested that if there was an extended move against me, I might run out of buying power/stop out before I could get back to breakeven.

Wipeout!! Well, on Wednesday June 10 I got crushed and had to shut myself down with the Daily Loss Limit. I was inclined to scalp to the short side, but the gap up wasn't big enough, so I decided to play it to the long side. Built up my size too soon, and stopped myself out at 36.29 around 2:15 pm, which just happened to be the low of the move down, and the QQQQ's then rallied nearly 2% into the close, which was the move I was looking for.

However I wasn't pissed. Actually I was glad it happened, because I knew there was something not quite right with my method. I realized that I wasn't paying enough attention to the charts, and more particularly, the appropriate setups that would help optimize my average entry price.

On Thursday, I decided to switch from scalping mode, to stalking mode when daytrading the QQQQ's. This might be a breakthrough for me. I made significantly less trades, but averaged significantly more profit/share stalking ($0.12) than scalping ($0.03). I even profitably traded UNH in this manner to the Long side shortly after its gap down open.

Today was another good day stalking the QQQQ's with a downside bias until about noontime, yielding about $0.07/share profit. I stopped daytrading around then to continue to deal with some IT issues.

System trading wise, my models have not generated any entry signals in about 9 days. Nothing is setting up right now, but who knows what will happen by 4 pm when the signals are officially generated.

No comments:

Post a Comment