First Trade Is The Best Trade

This has been the theme of my last few weeks. I come in, make a few hundred in the first few minutes and then, I churn a little away...

It happened again today, as my first trade of the day, in SLB, was also my best.

In the first minute of the trading day, SLB dropped from $101 to $100. Since it was a perfect "touch" at $100, I felt pretty good to enter after he bounced up to $100.25 and then dropped straight back down. So I got 400 shares off at $100. I covered at $99.65, $99.50, $99.43 and $99.29. I'm not throwing a graph up, since this all happened in the first 3 minutes of the day... the graph doesn't show much.

Anyway, after that, I made many messy little trades. But the good news is, I limited my losses on them all. My largest loser of the day was APA, for $65. I jumped the gun on this short soon after I covered my SLB and paid a small price. I paid a larger price when I missed the actual drop through $130 about 2 hours later... I need to work on continuing to pay attention to stocks after I feel I "missed" the trade, because often, I've just been early.

I also caught a nice short on ME through $32 that helped eat up almost all of my losers.

All in all, another green day. I still have static going on, but it's definitely lessening, and I feel it when I make the bad trades. I think this will continue to improve.

Anyway, it'll be a hard week for me to blog very actively. Tomorrow, I have to take my Series 7 "continuing education" requirement, and then I have some family matters to attend to the next couple of days after the close. Also, on Wednesday night, I'll be seeing the Fleet Foxes.

But man, I don't mind slowing down in all this heat and humidity... and who wants to be staring at a computer screen anyway? Can't you just feel the heat emanating from it, frying your face?

Good music drops with the sun.

UPDATE: Oh, and for those interested in the RO, it was a pretty good day... however, also a very stressful one. Most of the traders took heavy losses early and then came back in the afternoon for some relatively modest gains. I was #14 of 23 today.