2 steps forward, 1 step back

Well, things were kind of slow this morning until that new home sales data was released at 10. Then the fun began!

I was up a couple hundred due mostly to a decent IPS trade. When the data came out, I got short a couple of the mortgage lender stocks, RAS and CFC. My p&l shot up to about $700. Problem was that I then decided to start buying another lender when I saw CFC put in his bottom. This particular stock, FED, didn't give a DAMN that CFC had bottomed and I lost about $400 in him.

This was unbelievably stupid.

On the accompanying graph, I've marked where I was buying the stock with the light blue dots. Notice how the dots kept going down... and my p&l followed. So I'm $500 off my highs of the day here at 11:15 and I'm only up $230. This makes me very concerned that if I continue to trade I'll go negative. So I'm going to sit patiently and watch for the next couple of hours instead of trade.


Last week, Traderfeed put up a great post about The Anatomy of a Stock Breakout. I even posted a comment, thanking him and remarking that I often try to manufacture or anticipate trades instead of waiting for a trend to develop. Unfortunately, part of what I did wrong in FED was exactly that. I was anticipating a bottom and so I was burned.

Lesson learned?