A Good Morning, A Bad Afternoon

At 11:00 I was going to name this post, "Fuck Yeah!" or something like that. Early on, I could do no wrong. I was making excellent trades. That's exactly when I should have stopped.

The morning started off well with a position that I held short overnight, TNH. I am holding it short again tonight. But I covered it close to the open at 78 and booked a few points in profits.

When I saw the early weakness in TNH, I checked out POT which had opened close to flat. I short 200 at 189.58 and about 5 minutes later, covered 100 shares at 189.11. He then made a freakish move above the 190 level. It just seemed all wrong, the market was weak, TNH was weak, CF was weak... so I short 300 at 190.20 to make my full position in the stock -400.



He scared me a bit when he went up to 190.61, but really not to much because the market was selling hard. He broke after that run up and never saw the 190 level until late afternoon. I covered 100 at 188.96, 100 at 187.58, 100 at 187.86 and the last 100 at 188.24. When all was said and done, I had over $900 in profits in the stock. One of my best winners in a while.

At about this time, I was also shorting AGU. Now, I think I may need to check AGU a little more closely, because perhaps it's not a pure fertilizer company... whatever the case, he wasn't selling off and I got squeezed in him. But instead of continuing to fight the stock, I noted the strength and bought.



And things worked well. I only bought a little because the market was still selling, but I think I made back my losses from my earlier short. At around 12:30, I made my last good trade of the day. I picked up a pretty big position at 37.20, 2500 shares and I sold most of it at 37.30 and then the rest a bit higher. At this point, I was probably up a few hundred dollars in AGU.

At the end of the day though, he became my worst loser, at -$218. My afternoon was spent churning him and GWW which was at one point a winner and became my second worst loser at -$202. Had I left these two stocks alone in the afternoon, I'd probably have another $1000 in profits on the day.

But, I can't have that money back. That's the way the game is.

Still, despite my bad afternoon, I'm happy with the day. I hope to build on it tomorrow. Here's the stats:

P&L, $1231
Best, POT $915
Worst, AGU -$218

shares traded, 72,200
stocks traded, 21, 12 positive, 9 negative
total trades, 386