It has been a roller coaster for sure. Friday the 5th is when I subscribed to live market data for $20/month. I made $51 in 82 seconds on $TLRY. It was setting up so I went long. The instant I was in a position some tab scrolled up blocking my access to the trading buttons on the chart. What would have been $150+ ended up being only 1/3rd of that.
I thought about nothing but trading all weekend, and I believe I even traded the open of some day in my simulator, Think or swim on demand. Ended up making some money.
Monday rolls around and I made $87.50 and left a ton on the table because $IGC just kept running. It's okay though, I did not feel bad about it as I know this will happen often. What blew me away, was knowing how much money I would have been up if I had been trading that $13k size position from Friday... So much potential.
Tuesday I ended up taking no real trades because of an account setting I had that sweeps my excess cash over to the commodities side of the account, which disqualifies it for use on equities or something. I changed that setting and traded in the sim.
Wednesday the Market was very slow and I made some mistakes, which I covered in my previous blog post. Ended the day down $53.20 after commissions, which was about 2/3rds of that!
Thursday was slow as well and I got the inclination to walk away from the market down only $3 on the day, but $TLRY looked like it was setting up for a break higher and I took the bait. This is where my week really got worse. One beautiful thing about interactive brokers is that you can set your orders to size your shares based on a dollar amount, so your equity performance and dollar performance are much more closely linked. It keeps you swift as you no longer have the burden of doing the math to size your positions and can just click your hot keys to enter the position. Unfortunately I did not read the fine print when I checked off the option to set my position to be $1,000. A little box popped up that told me "Any position under 100 shares will execute at 100 shares", so when I went to trade $1,000 of a $136 stock (which would have been only 7.3 shares) it got me in at the minimum 100 shares, a $13,600 position! That is just one of the mistakes that ruined my day. Another unfortunate mishap was that I was setting a limit order to enter on the break of a recent high, and it executed me instantly at basically the top of the resistance instead of on a break of it like I had planned. I still do not know what happened to cause that, but regardless, I was in a position that I did not desire to be in. It was only 10 or so seconds after execution did I even pick up on the fact that I was in with 100 shares. I was panicked, but I decided to see if the trade would turn out as my instinct had suggested. Well, no it didn't because my instinct was only wanting to go long on the break of highs, which never happened. I took a loss of $110...
I then told myself "I am very familiar with the way this stock moves, and every time I trade it I walk away with profits on it". With that in mind I decided to stick with trading it and at the same $13k position size. I ended up taking 2 more losses and finally caught the bottom, but was shaken out given the fact that the stock kept making lower lows. The interesting thing, which seems to be happening to me a lot in this slower, choppier market, is that I end up taking losses when the stock offered me gains. If you look, the second and third entries would have paid me back and more on my first loss, and the fourth entry would have done even more so! Instead, I ended the day down over $330! It was a sorrowing defeat for me that day, because I had said earlier that I was going to walk away because the market was slow, and I was down $3... While $TLRY did have potential, I simply disregarded my own words. What I had realized after my $TLRY incident, was that it was having it's lowest volume day in a month, and the range on the day was only $4, which for $TLRY was not much, especially given that the spread alone on that stock is routinely $.50-$.80!
It was very difficult for me to face the markets again on Friday, and my only goal was to finish up green. I wanted to go into the weekend in the green. One thing that did help me feel better, was to realize that the loss I took on $TLRY was so damn small, that had I been trading it as a $1,000 position, it would have been basically a $10 loss... That's NOTHING! While I was tempted to come back trading with that full $13k size from the day before, I knew I was probably not in the best emotional state to be doing that. I ended up coming back to make $41.61 Friday, but commissions ate into that making it only $22.20! While that is a bummer, I am trying to keep in mind that I am trading $1,000 positions to acclimate myself into trading real money and the emotions that go with it. I still struggle to lose $20-$30, but I think that can be minimized with the right perspective. I mean, I'll go out to dinner and spend that without remorse (usually), why can't I spend $30 happily and without stress if it means I can get $100 back?
As the weekend ended, even though I finished green Friday a lot of enthusiasm had left me. I am trying to learn to let it go so that I can maintain the proper mindset for this. Without the mindset there is no long term success. I didn't do any studying that I can recall, but I also couldn't wait for Monday to get back in the ring and make up those losses. My goal was not to make them up though, it was just to trade good. And, I have to say Monday was another frustrating day. I took so great trades but just (once again) left a lot on the table!
I actually traded $TLRY because it was setting up. This stock can bounce like crazy and it usually puts in a nice long green candle with volume as the signal that the bottom is in. Even though I hesitated and did not take the initial entry I wanted, that would have paid me hundreds of dollars easily, I still traded it too conservatively when I actually did enter! Thankfully when I was at work turning on my platform to record my days charts, I saw it had broken out hard and pulled back. It was an important level to break and I felt the need to take the opportunity for continuation on the stock, so I did. I ended up making about another $90. It crashed pretty damn hard after that so I was thankful to have exited pretty much perfectly on the remainder of my position.
So that was a nice way to end the day. up $238.70 real money on the account, but I was still bitter about not having executed on my gut and buying what was essentially a routine bounce for $TLRY. Literally ever dollar per share that thing moved would have been $100 profit to my account, and I legitimately missed about $10/share of moves, to be conservative about it. Anyhow, I had made up the losses from last week and was still up $14 from when I had come back to real money trading.
No comments:
Post a Comment