The Man Show Boy

I've seen this a bunch of times but it just never gets old.

Prinzhorn Dance School, "Crackerjack Docker"

Okay, I can't even figure out if I like this song yet. But there's something about this video that I find very appealing.

Plus, the girl in the band is cute.

Freaky Hybrid Trade Of The Day, TNH!

I almost forgot about this.



Why was this freaky? Because it opened at 127.31 at 932:06. Less than a minute and a half later, at 9:33:26 it was trading 6 points lower at 121.58. Most of the volume of this move came on 100 share prints as the stock traded wildly sometimes swinging 50 cents to a point, intra-second!

Ray? C'mon. Can you get those handy-dandy hybrid builders to take a look at this?

I Can Exhale...

If the market was a big sun and I was a dog's ass... well, you know where I'm headed with that.

Anyway, this was indeed a refreshing way to end the week. Things got off to a bumpy start though as I fell into bad habits almost immediately shorting the heck out of CF.

Clearly, this was a mistake. Many of the Wallstreaker's were calling for a breakout at 61.20 which wasn't far off from where I began to short. Ah, the life of an idiot!

I won't bore you with the details of my many bad trades in the stock. I lost $890 in it, that should tell you the story. My next largest loser on the day was POT which I lost $14 in... sigh...Towards the end of the day I bought CF as it broke out of the flat base around $66 and was rewarded with decent gains. It's amazing how easy trading can be when you're on the right side of a trade.

I'm not really going to overanalyze my winners either. My best of the day was CMI.


I've been watching this stock closely the last few days and have been losing in it. He was the one that really killed me on Tuesday. Today I traded it okay. I bought pretty early in anticipation of the breakout at 116.25. When it did breakout I added a little to my position. I sold most of it very early but I did manage to hang onto the last 100 shares of my position up to $119 or so. A good trade.

My other two good winners on the day were TNH (hat tip to Stewie) and BTJ.

I have to say that I felt a little freer to trade today knowing that I would be shut down from adding new positions if I lost more than $500. It definitely lightened me up because the worst case scenario was well-defined for me.

The weekend has begun. This post is now over.

Here's the stats:

P&L, $846
Best, CMI, $527
Worst, CF, -$891

shares traded, 22,200
stocks traded, 11, 9 winners, 2 losers
total trades, 125

Virtual Office, $1889. Dow, +45.52, 13907.25.

Me, $846 on 22,200 shares traded.
Bubs, $762 on 3300 shares traded.
OBAT, $360 on 1000 shares traded.
HPT, $303 on 25 contracts traded.
Denarii, $110 on 3000 shares traded.
Misstrade, no trades.
Evolution, -$492 on 28,800 shares traded.

Considering that most of the VOers had their numbers to me by 1pm, it was a pretty good hours worked/money made ratio today.

And really, you have to give some credit to this market. After yesterday's screamer of a session you would expect any normal market to take some type of breather today. Not this market, it's damn strong.

A few weeks back someone posted a comment on "the Fly's blog" that I thought was interesting. This person theorized that in these next couple of months the shorts would get completely squeezed out. I don't know the figures, but there's a very high short interest in the market right now, probably helped along by products like the SDS and QID. Anyway, this person guessed this would create a blowoff top which would finally allow for a correction.

I kind of like that theory now as yesterday's rally was in large part, a short squeeze. We will see.

"It Makes Them Dangerous"

The Wedding

Not long ago, we went to a wedding. Here's a conversation I had with my daughter on the car ride home about it.

Me: "What color was the wedding?"
She: "You tell me."
Me: "Is that a color?"
She: "Brown! Brown! We went outside. We smelled the tree. That we bunched up."
Me: "What else?"
She: "That's it! I was spinning around and we were talking! And we were walking."
Me: "And what else?"
She: "That's it! That's it! We were spinning! We were spinning! We were spinning Dad!"

Anyway, just found it on a crumpled piece of paper I found in my pocket and thought I'd post it here before I lost it forever.

Stereogum's Radiohead Tribute

Hat tip to "vcn" who left a comment yesterday telling me about this new tribute to Radiohead's stellar album "OK Computer". You'll see if you click on the link that it's one of the very few albums given a rating of "10" by Pitchfork. I concur.

When that album first came out in 1997, my friend knew someone who worked at a record company. As a promo device, the people at this company were given advance copies of the album in a "walkman" (remember those?) with the tape of OK Computer welded in and continuously playing (until the batteries ran out). He gave it to me and I still have it. Pretty cool.

Incidentally, that same person may weekend blog here soon.

Anyway, here's the 2 songs I picked from the tribute that I liked the most.

Trading Collars

So, after I lost money again yesterday, I called my company's friendly risk manager and kindly asked them why the heck they keep letting me blow up all over the place.

It may be hard for you to believe, since I began this blog when I began my steepest decline as a trader, but there was a time when I was pretty damn successful. And these guys remember that and I think they basically figured I could work my own shit out. Wrong. This time feels different and I need "a little help from my friends".

I had an email conversation with Scalper a while back (hey, where the heck are you anyway? Send me an update!). He stopped trading each day if he was down $500. And, he did it on his own. He'd close his stuff and come back to fight another day. Great discipline there. That's the kind of discipline I've slowly let drift away from me.

So this is what I asked them to do for me. If I go down $400, the system will shut me out from putting on new trades for an hour. This will let me regain my composure and also let me know that I'm pursuing the wrong strategy for the day. After an hour the system will let me initiate new positions again, but if I lose another $400 (or $800 total net loss for the day) they'll turn me off for the day.

It feels kind of draconian to me but it's been a long time since I strung together a few strong days ($500+ net). I keep having weak up days followed by large down days. This will at least help me to stop the bleeding.

I'm not over the fact that I haven't made money since February. Because of this, my trading has been turned around. I hope when I should be fearful and vice versa. I'm holding out for "big trades" so I'm not selling when something goes in my favor (because I'm hoping it keeps running instead of taking what the market gives me) and I'm holding and adding when positions turn against me (hoping that they'll rebound and give me a large winner).

We'll see if this helps. I'm hopeful it will.