garethb said:Yesterday's Trades
Sorry for late post I am also trying to test on paper some Darvas based trades at the moment so a bit busy. All these trades were real money with same Strategy 3 rules as before.
9:48 S 400 CELG 57.28 - Bit slow to react and chased the stock price a bit hence bounced slightly and spent about 15 minutes "underwater". Not a great stock selection did not move quicly with falling market.
Cover 100 @ 57.18
Cover 200 @56.86 EE -120/-109/-104 - exhaustion but stock and market looked weak so held a small piece for further drop
Cover 100 @ 56.63 EE -99/-120ish/-120ish
P/L +151
10:48 L 500 AKAM @ 51.23
Stopped 300 @ 51.00
Sell 200 @ 50.95 though market was breaking down though looking back at chart I'm not sure why
P/L - 135
13:32 S 400 RIMM @130.25
Cover 200 @ 130.13 Market seemed to be moving up
Cover 100 @130.03 $ INDU Oversold signal
Cover 100 @ 129.31
P/L +132
14:15 L 600 AKAM 53.18
Cover 600 53.15 Market moved down again.
Up $118 on the day but lost $165 going long a stock which went up about 7% on the day!! Must have been the only person in the market to lose money long AKAM yesterday.
garethb said:Good Morning Samtron and any others watching.
I did well I think on Strategy 3 in November. Then after attempting to increase trade size I had a poor spell in early December. In the week upto christmas and January so far I have made a very small profit each week. From thanksgiving through to now is breakeven (actually +$13!)
I think Strategy 3 can be made to work . The strength of it for me is that the signal to trade can be made very black and white. I have an alarm setup on 1,3,5 minute MACCI's and when that goes off I may trade otherwise there is no trade. This has been helpful for me.
I have found the two key issues in success and failure for me are selection of the stock to trade and trade management. I haven't achieved 100% good stock selection but I am happy with that side. I still have issues with trade management basically not taking profit off the table quickly enough. I believe that Strategy 3 is a rather counter trend strategy. When you get into a trade usually one of three things happens:
1) very occassionally the MACCIs have given you a great turning point in intra day trend and your stock moves in your favour for a long run
2) the market pushes on to more overbought/oversold levels - often if your stock selection is good you can still get out with breakeven or small loss
3) by far the most common is the market reverses a bit to give you a good short term move then drifts. In this situatiion it is very easy for a strong stock to fall back and take your profits away
The occassional strong profit obtained when 1) happens and the risk of missing out on this can make it hard for me to take what is given in situation 3) which is the majority of cases. Also Strategy 3 doesn't give many good signals in a day so the pressure to earn a crust makes it hard for me to quickly close out what might be the only trade of the day for a small proft. Missing out feels very painful when there are bills to pay. Perhaps I am gradually getting to the point where the desire not to give back the profit when there are bills to pay is outweighing the desire for a bigger profit!
Perhaps one day my tape reading skills will be better allowing me to let the right winners run but at the moment I do best if I take partial profits fairly quickly then the remainder at early signs of exhaustion. I find the margin between success and failure in this is very narrow at the moment. A couple of messed up trades can turn a quite good week into a rather poor one.
The up and down nature of my results is due to my mindset issues which I think I am working through. I would say strategy 3 (pure and simple as originally described without Darvas or anything) works, but that it requires personal work and good focus on it to make it work. Probably true of any trading strategy.
Gareth
Hi Grey1Grey1 said:Thanks for the post. Strategy 3 is the foundation of more sophisticated algorithms. Much improvements can be made to strategy 3 to make better entry and also better choice of stock depending on how much you take day trading serious.
Area of improvements are
1) Find more appropriate time frame selection
2) Find more appropriate exhaustion levels ( instead of 100 and - 100 you could look for historical turning points )
3) basket trade rather taking one trade only .. ( trade more than one stock when the condition satisfy )
All above can be coded as i have got it myself and using it every single day .
Grey1
you are spot on . I Trade what I preach and this is my trades up until nowevostik said:Hi Grey1
Thank you for sharing the above areas of improvement. Regarding point 1 (timeframe selection) I would expect the 'best' timeframes to be dynamic and change over time - you have of course made reference to this before. Would I be correct in believing this is an area where gaining a better understanding and application of Cycle Analysis would be key?
Cheers
Steve
Grey1 said:you are spot on . I Trade what I preach and this is my trades up until now
Iraj
moreagr said:thank you Grey1 for posting your transactions but based on the charts on NVDA an entry seemed extremely risky since it was in OS levels
was it a top down technical that made you place the trade
Thanks guys,rajibde said:Thanks Moreagr for asking the question
- Just to elucidate a bit further -at the point of G1s entry, the Dow was OS in 10, 15, 30 and 5 min time frames- based on that all I was thinking was OS signals in the 1 & 3 min also to make a long entry.. I am also eager to know the thought process behind the trades.
Raj