A feel good type of day

Well, I'm just happy I was green for a change. It helped also that it was a beautiful day outside and I spent the late afternoon into the early evening on a picnic with my wife and daughter. It's hard not to smile on days like these.

But before the picnic came the trading. The daily battle with the market.

My last week has been tough. I've had 5 or 6 straight losing sessions in a row. Hard to take. But even though I was losing each day, I was losing small and not making too many bad errors of the type that would hurt my psyche.

Overall, I didn't have any huge winners today. I'm still keeping most of my positions very small. So my biggest winner was only for $206, but it was a nice trade for only a 300 share position.

The stock was ALB. I'd show a graph, but for some reason, my esignal graphs are down at the moment. Misstrade did a nice job of posting the setup on his site.

I bought the "bounce" early, at 40, 300 shares. I meant to stop all at a new low, but only put a stop for 200 there and got shaken out quickly for a quarter point loss on 200 shares. But the other 100 shares sat there and the stock quickly bounced back over 40 and I was able to sell the last 100 shares at 40.59 for a small overall gain on the trade.

Later, I noticed the stock stalling and then slowly beginning to roll. As Misstrade points out on his site, the stock made it to the bottom of the Opening Range and started to meet resistance. So I short 200 shares at 41.27 at around 12:30 and then added another 100 shares about 20 minutes later as the trade was moving in my favor. I covered at 40.76, 40.49, and 40.37 for about $200 on the trade. I was pretty thrilled with this because I almost never make any money between 12 and 1pm.

Other than that, the best thing I did today was catch a quick pop this morning early in OSK because I noticed the strength in CMI. They sometimes trade together. I also was involved in a nice CMI short with Misstrade.

But the real story of the day was keeping my losers in check. My worst loser of the day was AG for -$61. I'll take that any day. Especially because it was right off the open and I thought I got kind of screwed. I didn't make any "revenge" trades in the guy though and that was key for me.

Here are the stats:

P&L, $569
Best, ALB, $206
Worst, AG, -$61

shares traded, 22,400
stocks traded, 16, 9 positive, 7 negative
total trades, 130