Happy Monday

Today I sold shit for $243. Okay, okay... I'll explain.

My wife called me downstairs at 9:25 to tell me that "the oil guy is here" to clean the burner. I hate having people I don't know in my house, especially when I know they'll be bothering me while I work and even more when they arrive when the market is about to open. I'm easily bothered, I admit it.

Anyway, sure enough, 2 minutes later, Judy calls me again to tell me the guy can't figure out how to turn on the lights in the basement. I rush down to the basement. The dude, who looks like a "carnie" is standing in my basement in the dark, looking at the cat litter boxes and mumbling something to me about ferrets. I turn on the lights, but clearly, this man wants to talk to me... about his pets.


It must be very close to 9:30, but he begins to ramble. He had a cat, but his lizard ate his cat, so he doesn't have a cat anymore. He has 9 ferrets. I should get ferrets he tells me... he also has goldfish, 3 birds and a turtle. Anyway, I couldn't get a word in to tell him that I had to get upstairs to work.


Luckily, Judy yelled down in her "emergency" voice and I ran up the stairs. There in the middle of our kitchen stood our son, naked, and a pile of shit. He's potty training, but today he had an accident. He smiled at me, seemingly not concerned about the shit and said, "I got socks! You got socks, Daddy?" Judy was flustered. One of our cats, not known for his intelligence, was slowly approaching the pile. Things looked grim. I separated all of the interested parties while Judy took care of the poo.


It was 9:35 and I had missed the open.


As it turns out, I had entered a bunch of orders pre-market. One of them, Buy 200 VMC at open, ended up being my big winner on the day.

I was attracted to this stock for a couple of reasons. First of all, on Friday it had violated its 50-day moving average on light volume. Also, it was very close to an upside break of a trendline I had drawn on a 60 minute graph. So I bought the stock at 115.05. Had I not been in my kitchen at 9:35 attending to a pile of shit, I may have put my stop in at 114.80 and been stopped out at the low of the day. As it turned out, the trading gods smiled at me today. I bought 100 more at 115.25 and then sold 100 at 115.49, 100 at 115.37 and the final 100 at 116.95.

I also did a masterful job of minimizing my losers. Okay, I have to go.

Here are the stats:

P&L, $683

Best, VMC $243

Worst, WSO -$99

stocks traded, 18, 11 positive, 7 negative

shares traded, 15,400

total trades, 162