Stock Trades Add Up To Small Gain

I had another green day today. When you're down on a month, green is good, no matter what.

My best trade of the day came early, in V, an HCPG watchlist stock. They were looking for the stock to trade down to $78. I saw it was relatively weak off the open and so I was watching it closely. Volume wasn't great yet, but the weakness was enough for me to be transfixed. It traded down near $79 quickly and then bounced, but rolled almost immediately.



I covered quickly after the first move down. I missed the real move when it bounced back up to $79 before cratering down to $77. $79 on the bounce was a perfect reentry... just afraid to enter. I made another good entry on the stock around 11:30, through $78. Again, my exits were fucked up. I covered way too early and missed a nice 2 point move down close to $76. Not sure what it's gonna take for me to start holding for these larger moves.

Probably desperation, brought on by extreme poverty.

Anyway, I then managed to fuck myself up trading BTU short. I got stubborn, added to a losing position, and blew out near the top of the move (classic) for a $200 loss. I also had smaller losses in DVN and SLB. So despite my initial good trade, I was down and had some fighting back to get through.

I saw a couple of trades that didn't have "daily spots" but were trading with good volume. STP had a nice flat base and I felt safe entering at $47. I was hoping for a quick pop down. Had it popped up to $47.10, I would have taken the loss. This was a perfect entry. Volume came in and the stock quickly plummeted. Again, I fucked up the exits. See below...



I saw another opportunity in BTU, the same stock that I screwed up earlier. So I cut my size to 100 shares and gave it a shot.



This was a good trade despite the small size. BTU had visited the $76.25 level three times on the day and had met resistance there continually the prior two days. So when he bounced weakly off that level while running into both the intraday downtrend line and $77 resistance, I thought it was a good entry spot.

My worst stock on the day was SLB. Again, just a case of me not covering when I'm wrong. I'm really beginning to see that if I just cover when shit doesn't work immediately that I'll do myself much less damage than if I hold and wait for it to return to my level. Just cover. If necessary or applicable, reenter later. Just cover and take a small loss.

On the other side, respect the stops... if the position doesn't move against my original entry, I should try to at least hold 100 shares for a larger move.

Here's the stats:

P&L, $165
Best, V, $161
Worst, SLB, -$85

9400 shares traded.
9 stocks traded, 6 winners, 3 losers.