Shipping Is En Fuego

I guess that's kind of a no-brainer with oil at $76 a barrel, huh?

Anyway, that was the story of the day although that wasn't clear to me at the open.

At the open, I was paying attention to "the Fly" pick VMI and I was looking for a quick pop in LNN (they are competitors) due to the strength of the earnings in VMI. I made a quick half point in LNN and moved on. Later, I would buy back and make another 20 cents, but in the morning it was a quick play for me.

I then got involved in a number of bad trades. I hate days like today, when the market gaps up and then immediately flatlines or heads lower. I'm feeling all bullish at the open and then you get all these failed trades. It's frustrating because you get long, you look at the indexes and they're all up, but you're losing money.

My worst trade at this point came in UBB. I was really watching it to hold the $130 level after the gap up in the morning.



I felt confident it would and I was actually afraid it wasn't going to pull all the way back down to $130, so I put limits in at $130.40 to buy some. I was filled and watched the stock sink lower. When it broke $130, I sold, taking a .40 loss on 300 shares. But here I got involved with some of my bad thought patterns. I reexamined the 15-minute graph, and was like, "Oh yeah, support wasn't at $130, it's really at $129.60 or so" and with this newly minted confidence, I bought again. And, I lost again. Then, I made the "support" at $129.40 and you can see what happened. I sold near the low of the day, right around $129.

Eventually, the stock rebounded. Actually, it bounced right after I sold and I was so angry that I thought hard about injuring my cat. I didn't want to kill the cat, but I thought about snapping a rubber-band at him or something... but I didn't.

Instead I moved onto the shippers. "Stewie" and "johnson" over at Wallstreak were watching DRYS and GNK which were both up strong and ripping. So I bought into a couple of the shippers that trade on the NYSE, EXM and SFL.



SFL is not a very volatile stock, so I felt comfortable buying a larger position than I've been trading with lately. I picked up 800 shares right around $30 a share. After a brief correction, the stock moved smartly up, mirroring the strength in the rest of the sector. I sold some in the $30.35 area, but held the rest and ended up netting over a half point in the trade.

This was good for me mentally for a couple of reasons. When things were good, 800 shares was the way I liked to start positions. It was nice to get back to that number of shares and have a trade work in my favor. Felt like the old days, even if it was just for a half point.

Anyway, I'm very happy with the way I've rebounded after the disaster I had from last Tuesday. If I can keep this up for the rest of the month, I should be in a good mental state heading into the vacation month, August. I've also noticed that I'm kind of settling in with making just under 100 trades a day (50 trades, open and shut) and trading around 15,000 shares. I think this consistency in my raw numbers is a good sign, although I don't know why.

Here's the stats:

P&L, $464
Best, SFL, $433
Worst, UBB, -$399

shares traded, 15,200
12 stocks traded, 7 positive, 5 negative
total trades, 92

QUESTION: Does anyone who uses Blogger know how to create links so that when the user clicks on the link it opens a separate window instead of navigating away from my site? Replies may be made by email (see my profile) or in the comments section. Any help is appreciated.