Thursday, June 05, 2008

Daily Summary

7200 shares
+465

Trading was much better today. My opening range breakouts finally worked. I think it is because the market broke out of a downtrend today by breaking over previous day's highs. I was trading MTL, NUE, PX and they all had nice moves. Too bad I only had 100 shares of MTL and NUE. I made around $1.50 on both. I made 50 cents on PX with 200 shares.

3 comments:

Tomer said...

I have two words for you: "Position sizing"!
Man.. I've had it with you saying "too bad I took only 100 shares of this and that", c'mon, start using the R system, tell yourself that you are losing X$ per trade, thus if a trade will have smaller spread between the stop that you intend to put, you'll make more money on its way up, and in general you'll be making a whole lot more than your nice 500$ per day etc..

Please please read material about the R system, and start utilizing it, I like your trading, but man.. you can make more money than you already do.

OBAT said...

You are right tomer. My position sizing needs a lot of work. I have tried the R system but couldn't make it work before. I am going to take a go at it again.

Right now even with 100 shares I am afraid. I am trying to build my confidence up by getting some winning days. My daily avg win rate of 30-40% needs improvement. If I can get my win rate up to 60s then I will be comfortable in adding my size to my trades.

Tomer said...

What I see in you trading is this:
1. Stable on down days (not losing so much money, less than 100$ usually).
2. Nice profits on up days (more than down days that is)

Which leads me to think that, your system is profitable on the long run, and I think that the 30-40% of profitable or non profitable trades is just another number, what really counts is the expectancy, and yours is Positive, which means that you are making money even with less than 50% win ratio.

That being said, it means that you have a sound money management, now what you need is just to high the amount you stake about 5 to 10$ a week on each trade, and then you'll gain confidence with your bigger size, thus after a while you'll have tramendous results, imagine having a usually -100 to -150$ down day, and 1000-1200$ up day, it's possible, and even more, just utilize the R system.

I've acually made a program that calculates your R real time, it is really convinent program, and I'd be happy to share it, my Email is tomerep@gmail.com, give me a buzz and I'll send it to ya :)

About Me

I have been trading for 5 years. It took close to a year before I became profitable. I find that I am improving gradually each year. My method of choice is scalping. My edge lies in tape reading NYSE stocks and staying on the side of the specialist. That is the method I learned when I started. As I build up my capital I will try new styles and trade new markets. In late 2006 my trading hit a rough patch after the introduction of the NYSE Hybrid system. For most of 2007, I have been on a search for new strategies that would help me adapt to the market.