The RO Report, "Quiet Consolidation" Edition

Perfect. After a nice run yesterday, today was a perfect follow-up... a low volume consolidation day. It wasn't a great day for trading, it was more like a chopfest and sensing this, I ducked out for a midday surf session. And man, it was quiet around the blog too...

Trading isn't just about entries and exits, it's also about changing gears when necessary. We're moving into a holiday week, and with the large catalyst of the FOMC meeting behind us, we could be in for some slow times until January. That's not to say there won't be opportunity everyday, but pick your spots.

A trading friend of mine says this has turned into a very benign market. You can search for spots on daily graphs and trade around them. That's completely different from just a couple of weeks ago.

Tomorrow is my company's holiday party and Friday is my daughter's holiday performance at her school. So posting here may get light. I plan on publishing my 2008 Best Stock Market Blog Post, post on the 29th. If you want to send me your favorite blog post of the year, please do so by Christmas at the latest. Next week I won't be posting much at all. However, I have a few "history" posts nearing completion.

My plan is to start 2009 off with a bang around here, so I'll try and get a number of them done next week when I'm taking it easy.

Anyway, the numbers today suck. Out of 26 traders, 11 finished gross positive, or 42%. Only 1 trader managed to make over $1,000 gross, but 7 traders lost over $1,000 gross. Ugly. I was #5 of 26. Happy to be green.

"Chambermaid" - Trader C, -$23,628 on 128k shares traded.

2. Trader H*, -$6,384 on 14,200 shares traded.
3. Trader N, -$5,808 on 74,800 shares traded.
4. Trader P, -$4,609 on 137k shares traded.
5. Trader Z, -$4,393 on 46,300 shares traded.

"Lucky Pierre" - Trader G, $1,306 on 49,600 shares traded.

2. Trader 6*, $872 on 800 shares traded.
3. Trader J, $811 on 44,000 shares traded.
4. Trader E, $672 on 37,000 shares traded.
5. Trader S, $530 on 19,800 shares traded.

Here's the "heatmap."