Friday, January 18, 2008

Anticipating A Bottom

For some reason, I got it in my head that we were going to finally have a reversal.



When we couldn't break down to the lows of the day at around 1pm, I took that as a bullish signal. However, the volume never picked up with the little bounce that ensued and when the rally broke, just after 2pm, my P&L went south with the futures.

Of course, we rallied again at 3pm and I got sucked in again.

So the story of my day is simple. I was transfixed on the futures all day. I'm not even going to get into individual stock trades because I was timing my trades from the moves in the futures. I was just wrong about us breaking higher.

So the two day total cost of me anticipating a rally off the lows is up to a little over $1800. Pretty annoying.

This weekend will be a real test for me and my attempts to maintain a more positive attitude.

Anyway, here's the stats:

P&L, -$681
Best, SXE, $218
Worst, GHL, -$227

38,800 shares traded.
26 stocks traded, 10 winners, 16 losers.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Man, you're really about attitude lately.

I'd be interested to know what you do specifically this weekend, if anything, about improving your attitude. Are you still meditating?

Hang in there.

AT

Dinosaur Trader said...

AT,

It's true. I just realized during my hiatus that my attitude was awful and negative and in many ways self defeating.

I'm just trying to cultivate a new way of me thinking about this job.

I'm not meditating as consistently as I was, however, I'm planning on going to a class this weekend. Also, lately when I've been going to sleep I've been listening to meditation tapes, just to relax.

You'll always be the godfather of Attitude Trading though.

-DT

Jawbreaker said...

So much of trading is mental. Stay positive DT and dont let your energy turn negative man. I have been trading the futures alot more then stocks recently (Via Tradestation) and it has been going pretty good. Maybe try futures once in a while. Dont let yourself get to down DT and you will do fine. Have a great weekend. - tony