Friday, July 13, 2007

I Can Exhale...

If the market was a big sun and I was a dog's ass... well, you know where I'm headed with that.

Anyway, this was indeed a refreshing way to end the week. Things got off to a bumpy start though as I fell into bad habits almost immediately shorting the heck out of CF.

Clearly, this was a mistake. Many of the Wallstreaker's were calling for a breakout at 61.20 which wasn't far off from where I began to short. Ah, the life of an idiot!

I won't bore you with the details of my many bad trades in the stock. I lost $890 in it, that should tell you the story. My next largest loser on the day was POT which I lost $14 in... sigh...Towards the end of the day I bought CF as it broke out of the flat base around $66 and was rewarded with decent gains. It's amazing how easy trading can be when you're on the right side of a trade.

I'm not really going to overanalyze my winners either. My best of the day was CMI.


I've been watching this stock closely the last few days and have been losing in it. He was the one that really killed me on Tuesday. Today I traded it okay. I bought pretty early in anticipation of the breakout at 116.25. When it did breakout I added a little to my position. I sold most of it very early but I did manage to hang onto the last 100 shares of my position up to $119 or so. A good trade.

My other two good winners on the day were TNH (hat tip to Stewie) and BTJ.

I have to say that I felt a little freer to trade today knowing that I would be shut down from adding new positions if I lost more than $500. It definitely lightened me up because the worst case scenario was well-defined for me.

The weekend has begun. This post is now over.

Here's the stats:

P&L, $846
Best, CMI, $527
Worst, CF, -$891

shares traded, 22,200
stocks traded, 11, 9 winners, 2 losers
total trades, 125

1 comment:

OBAT said...

The automatic shut down stop loss is a good idea. Trading feels a lot lighter to know your maximum risk per day.