Category: Trading

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MRNA News Catalyst

Wow what a morning. $MRNA popped up on a news catalyst that informed us great unwashed that they would be partnering with Merck to develop a cancer vaccine. Yeah, pretty good news.

The stock gapped up in the premarket to $135 from $118. Helluva gap I would say. I would also say that keeping that kind of level would be hard so I decided to go short 100 shares. At the open, it popped up to $141 before slowing dropping back down into the low $130’s. I had to wait 45 minutes for it to come back down after selling 35 more shares as it went up making my average price 134.33. I got out at 132.30 for a two dollar profit on 135 shares ($270).

I KNEW it would come back down as that size of gap isn’t something that can usually be maintained all day. Folks want to take profits and more selling than buying will cause a stock price to go down. I include a screen shot below of the trade.

5M Opening Range chart for MNRA

It should be noted that I, again, didn’t stick with my stop loss. I should have been out around $135.33 with a $100 loss but my convictions kept me from covering my short. It should also be noted that I used ALL my margin so couldn’t short any further on the way up.

Now, my largest criticism in myself is not that I ignored my stop, it’s that I ignored my stop AND missed out on an almost 6$ move up from the open. Had I read the chart correctly and inferred group psychology, I should have KNOWN that people would want to get in on this action at the open and drive the price up.

That first candle at 0930 opened at $135.56, closed at 135.58 and would have been a good candidate for an IMMEDIATE entry at 0935 when the second candle opened. It went up and up and up and I missed it. That would have been the safer trade as well with the 5M Opening Range Breakup setup being one I’ve been using since September.

I need to start reading the opening range better and trying to hold off trading until 5 minutes after the open. This is a discipline problem and I have to make a decision about how important it is. I HAVE been burned in the past by deciding to hold a short longer than I perhaps should have when a stock was in a serious uptrend and I took a loss of $400.

Trading is easy. /sarcasm

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Markets Fall, Money to Be Made

Decent Short action this morning

I’ve attached an image of my trade this morning above. Yes, I only took one and then decided I should not get greedy. There will come a time for that but now is not the time.

$OXY (the stock in the chart above) has been popping at the open then dropping nicely in the first hour before consolidating and then choosing a direction it’s going to move for the rest of the day. Friday October 7, 2022 is a good example of that happening. So I just expected it to do the same thing it has been and shorted the stock.

Shorting a stock can be dangerous and it’s not something to be taken lightly. Here’s a link to Investopedia that has some information on what short selling is if you’d like to read it. You need to be sure about your decision or be ready to take a small loss and cover your position if it goes the other way especially if you’re using a leveraged margin account. Some of my biggest losses since March have been from shorts so I’m very particular about my short setups.

I’m happy with this trade and came out with about $150 USD net after commissions. Slight change of topic….

Last month I mentioned perhaps posting my final results for September and I reversed my decision on that. It was a good month and I’ll just assume you believe me when I say that overall I pulled $2200 USD out of the markets and decided I should pull a little of that out into my bank account. I decided on $1000 CDN ($740 USD on the 4th when I transferred the money or 1/3 of my gains) would be a good start.

  1. It would be a reminder that I want to do this for a living and in order to live, you have to generate income. Moving money from my brokerage account just felt good and reinforced the idea, for me, that I could do this for a living.
  2. It would allow me to keep 2/3 of my gains in the account. I’d like to grow the account to the point I’m above $20k USD for additional leverage possibilities. An account of that size would allow for up to $60k of stock purchase with margin included. At this point, it will probably take a year.
  3. It would allow me to show my wonderful wife that this is a possibility that shouldn’t be taken lightly.

That last one is, far and away, the most important part of the withdrawal process. Sitting her down and talking about wanting to pursue this rather than continue the job search was important.

She is the most important person in my life and will always have a say into my career and what I do with my life. I think she’s already a bit peeved that I’m at home most of the day and really only ‘work’ for a couple of hours in the morning before heading out for my walk later in the day.

She doesn’t see the rest of it, of course. The reading, the study, the videos, the simulator work. It does keep me quite busy. I can’t just sit at home and play video games if I plan on getting better at this. It’s a lot of work and my performance in the markets each morning really depends on my knowledge and ability to think on my feet while the markets are open.

I’m going to keep doing this for a least the next 5 months with the expectation that my daily average will increase (currently at $77.88 USD per day but ever climbing) and that I’ll be hitting my long term goal of $350 USD average per day. That would effectively replace the salary I left in March and allow for additional trading opportunities.

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Trading Is Easy

No it fucking isn’t.

This trade is a clusterfuck of emotions and bad decisions. See that big assed red candle on the left? After a crazy day yesterday with Cassava Sciences Inc increasing 20$ over the day, this morning there was a crazy drop BEFORE the markets even opened from a high of $48 down to $39 over the course of a 5 minute period. Here’s where the fuckery comes in.

I quickly analyzed the situation and decided that when the market opened we’d get a bounce back up, probably half way around $45. So I bought shares in a market when it might have been smarter to sell into the weakness. No, not your superhero buddy Zaal! No he BUYS into a selling market on a hunch.

Well this idiot was right. When the market opens (that first big green candle) it did start crawling back towards my target. I actually had a limit order in at $44.37 so that was going to be our OUT! Other than the little red Doji candle at 0935, it continued up as expected with steady volume. As it neared the top of the 0950 candle, it seemed the momentum was slowing. I started to get a bit nervous and thought how stupid it would be if I didn’t even try to take some profit now that I was in the green. I took two partials and sold 50 shares @ $43.16 and $43.21 with my average cost of $41.31.

“What does that mean for you, idiot?”. It means that I made some money. How much? On the first 50 shares, I made $92.50. Second 50 shares, $95. But I held the last 50 in the hopes it might get higher and it did with me finally selling my last 50 shares @ $44.37 for a final profit of $153. All of these numbers are documented on the image above if you want to click on it.

So I got triple my daily target by:

  1. Using my limited trading knowledge
  2. Knowing what happened in the market on the previous day
  3. Willing to risk some money to get more money.

If I’d not known any of those three things checked off above, I wouldn’t have taken the trade.

Straight talk here: when the stock was at it’s lowest, if I’d decided to close my position at max loss, I would have been out $600 but I didn’t because of the three items listed above.

So… intraday trading. Yeah, super easy. 😒

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Powell is My New Best Friend

Words to remind yourself how stupid you are sometimes:

You are a fucking retard. Did you know that? Are you aware that you are so stupid that I risk being labelled intolerant in order to address you as FUCKING RETARDED? There will come a time where you are punished for your hubris. YOU GOT LUCKY TODAY PUNK. I honestly believe that. Yes, the news from Powell saved your ass. Imagine being a dollar behind on a SHORTED stock and then having a safety line sent to you from an American economist. You should send that fucker a fruit basket. 
Put in stop loss orders and adhere to them, idiot.

That is all.

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Good Day in the Market

I’m hoping to have more of these and with the profits generated by analysis rather than just luck.

I’ll also give you a link to the Chartlog share here. This was such a great trade and something that really makes me think this is something I could do on a regular basis. Though I’ve had some success in the rest of the month, this was a top day.

This month has been pretty successful but I don’t want to put a whammy on it by boasting too early. I’ll do the same thing I did back in March on the first of October with a short report and analysis of the month.

This has been one of the more interesting things I’ve done over the past few years. It’s definitely one of the hardest and, at times, frustrating. My logical mind wants to bend the markets to my will and define them in static and concrete ways. It can’t be done and I need to call on the other trait of a software developer and think abstractly to assist in defining rules and seeing patterns in the charts.

Anyone that wants to follow in these steps please be warned: this is not easy and it’s not something that comes quickly. I’ve been messing around with the markets since May of 2021 and only now am I starting to feel like I’m semi-competent.

Anyways. 0730 comes early. Time to hit the sack.

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Notes to Self

After a number of stupid decisions:

You broke rules again today, Chris.

You are going to lose money and it will end this endeavor and then where will you be? Sitting at a desk speaking into a headset asking people to turn it off and on again. What will it take? At some point you’re going to ignore and hold a loss until it clears out what you’ve made already.

We need to be ready for losses but they need to be managed by YOU, not by luck. And that’s what happened today. You got lucky. I don’t even want to look at the chart anymore.

This was a three hour fucking trade that NEVER should have happened. Had you taken the loss and then reversed your position, you would have made MORE money than you just did ($37.85). Sure that’s still 12$ an hour but is that the reason you’re doing this? To make minimum wage risking your own capital? That’s not the idea. 

That is all.

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March 2022 Results of FT Intraday Trading

This is something I wanted to do as time passes; there’s a need in me to provide evidence of accountability in the things I do when there’s the possibility of me … ‘cheating’ to look like things are going better than they actually are. This activity would be more to fool myself more than anyone else but it can’t hurt to have folks who are interested follow along with my progress. I’ll be adding an entry at the end of each month, if not more often, to celebrate my successes and discuss my failures.

Continue reading “March 2022 Results of FT Intraday Trading”
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Late Night Musings

I’ve been practicing day trading since April of last year. I’m sure I’ve mentioned it before but at the beginning of this month I started trading live with cash. This is real day trading not in the simulator. Real money is at risk and I could lose it all. Insert evil laugh here.

Much of what people call intra day trading can be summed up in one sentence: profit more than you lose. Sounds really easy but it’s not. There’s so many pitfalls you can find yourself in if you’re not careful.

Click through to read more….

Continue reading “Late Night Musings”
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Canmore: Summer Vacation 2021

Yay. We’re headed out for a few days of R&R about an hour away. Mostly it’s to get out of the damnable city while the ‘get drunk in cowboy garb’ folk are busying doing what they do. Even just the past couple of day have been intolerable.

It’s not Florida trip but it’s better than repeatedly being kicked in the face with soccer cleats. I think.

On another note, I’ve started studying intraday trading of the stock market. It’s an interesting topic and it’s been in the news over the past six months so it’s piqued my curiosity. My new morning process is getting up at 0600, taking a look at what the markets did overnight and selecting one or two stocks to play off the open using a simulator account that’s not real money. So far, in 5 weeks, I’m down almost $2k in play money. If/When I can get that simulated account in the green, I might consider using a real funded account to play around with it in the mornings.

Aim for the sky; even if you miss you’ll be among the stars. Or some such shit.