Nice afternoon rally, but volume lower

You were able to draw a nice trendline on the futures today. The market basically sold off from the highs of the morning and bounced along this line until it broke it after 2pm today. After that, the market didn't look back, it just rallied. The only problem I have with the market from a short-term bullish perspective is that yesterday's sell-off was on higher volume than today's rally. As an IBD reader, that's not so great. Still, no one complains when the market is up 48 points... it's bad form.

I was able to catch a nice trade in CF because if you look at the two graphs, they are very similar. CF gapped up this morning and then trended down all day. Once the trend was broken, he rallied nicely. I had a decent amount of shares from 38.10 but sold a good chunk around 38.25 because I thought the trendline for the last 4 days or so would create problems. It didn't... so I sold out of a lot of shares "early". I'm not complaining though...


Daily stats:

P&L $560

Best: CF $450
Worst: ITG -$100

stocks traded: 18. 11 positive, 7 negative
total trades: 221

Tomorrow is the last day of the month. With my last 2 days of gains, I have a shot of NOT having my first negative month ever. It will take an excellent day. Still, I'm not going to do anything stupid. It would be nice to get to even, but I don't want to jeopardize the progress I have made or the confidence I'm slowly regaining.

Black Lips - Not A Problem

I just can't get enough of this song. If you like 60s era garage rock, check it out. It's the second song on that list.

More Help from Traderfeed

Hey, I checked Traderfeed this morning for Part II of his post that was started yesterday on self-sabatoge. On today's post he linked an older post that has some very helpful articles on psychology and trading.

If you've ever been in a trading rut (and who hasn't?) or are planning on getting yourself into one soon, I highly recommend checking these articles out. They're at the bottom of the post.

To quote the band Sublime, "hard work good, and hard work fine, but first take care of head." Of course, I don't think they were writing about trading... Still, the point is that you can look at 1000 graphs a night, but if you're stuck in some bad trading patterns, spotting opportunities probably isn't your biggest problem.

Slow morning

Volume is lighter this morning than it was at the same time yesterday. And I hate the action on days like today. The futures gapped up on the GDP data but then sold off. It's hard to get short days like this because even though the market is trading down, there's plenty of bullishness anyway so the squeezes can be quick and violent. At the same time, it's hard to initiate longs because a lot of stocks gapped up and then got choppy... good entries were hard to come by... at least in this cave.

So anyway, I took it easy this morning. I'm up a couple hundred bucks but I don't have a winner or loser that's greater than $100. I'm going to spend the next hour looking at charts and then take a long lunch. Hopefully, in the afternoon things will be more interesting.

I haven't even spotted any freaky hybrid trades... (sigh).