It's been a while, but I've got caught up posting my trades for the past month. I've blogged about all this already, but I'll summarize the past 7 months for convenience.
- April was a breakout month for me, pulling in ~$1500 and really feeling like I was making progress. Most of those profits came from shorts.
- First day of May, I lost 1/2 of it on a terrible short on $I during an earnings call. I decided to take the rest of that month off to think about how I ended up in that position and how I could avoid it moving forward. That stock has pretty much tripled since those days, so I was really off with my thinking at the time.
- At the start of June, I unloaded a terrible bagholding position of $CLRB for massive gains (~$4500). That basically put me 1k over my initial funding of my ToS account and like $100 over my initial funding of my IB account. In other words, my year of trading and losses were wiped clean and I had a fresh start with some extra money.
- At the end of June, I took a really bad short on $VSTM and ended up losing $3700. It was really crushing because I let it happen, and there was no reason why I should have. I blogged about it, but I decided I needed to take a step away from trading for a bit to recollect myself. This set me back quite a bit, so I'm back to being red on my trading account.
Since then, I've been watching the markets, but it wasn't until the end of September, that I felt like I could slowly start trying to get back into things. I had a goal I wanted to reach by the end of the year (basically get back all the money I lost in June), and I felt like it was an out of reach goal going into this month.
I'm just not good at trading pennystocks. My perspective on things as I trade just isn't leading me to many winners, and a lot of times I end up getting too cautious and miss the big moves or take small fast profits because I'm so used to losing. I don't want to give up on trading or pennystocks, but right now the reality is that I need to try other things.
October has been a really brutal month for the markets. $QQQ was 15% down off the highs today before the EoD bounce. As I watched this month develop, I noticed volatility has been high and that means there's going to be some crazy moves being made. I missed a lot of bigger picture market moves this year simply because I was focused on pennystocks, but now that I'm shifting my focus, there's a lot of potential opportunity setting up daily in the quality stocks.
I began looking for opportunity trading $QQQ. The idea was simple: the markets are undergoing a correction, while we'll have to wait and see if we're entering a bear market, it's not going to change the fact that the markets will recover eventually. If I buy $QQQ, I can hold it long term until it goes back up (granted I'm not bagholding my entire account at once so I can't add on further dips), so having that ease of mind has really helped me take some winning trades lately (what I mean is, I can stomach the market going down, but it's not like I have to worry about an overnight offering or delisting or T12 halt like junk that runs).
I choose to trade $TQQQ lately because it's a 3x ETF tracking $QQQ moves. Those have serious risks to them, so don't touch them until you read the prospectus and understand the implications of holding them. I've had experience with such ETFs back in 2009/2010 and then 2017, so this isn't my first time touching them. I just wanted to mention that, because while I'm not that good at what I'm doing, I do have some idea of what I'm doing, so it's not random trading.
It's not been perfect though, as I've had some profitable trades, but I could have done a lot better. Today though, I really noticed my experience the past few weeks paying off. Even though I didn't end up hitting the trades I was going for, I feel like the burden of my year end goal is off my shoulders now, because that goal is actually obtainable.
I'm up about $1400 this month, and it feels good because losing all the time is hard. I feel like I've learned so much leading up to this point, but my trades and account balance progress, doesn't really reflect it. Getting the necessary experience over time without throwing away your money is really tricky, so I feel if I can focus on higher priced stocks right now in this type of market and get ahead, then when things turn around, I'll be set.
I'm not going to try to force anything though, and risk giving back all my gains, but I feel like I can really capitalize on this terrible market month going into next year. I still find myself making some of the same mistakes, but today I realized why, but I don't know how to fix it yet for most stocks.
My plan today was to accumulate up to a 600 share position in $TQQQ on the dips, and sell into the bounces or overnight. For this to work though, I needed a day where the potential upside for a move is $3+. Basically, I know I'm terrible at timing things, so if I can catch $1 move on X shares, I'm that much closer to my goal.
However, today had really limited range, only about $1 between highs and lows. I did not force any trades because that setup isn't what will get me where I want to be. Going into the afternoon, I saw the selloff starting to setup, but unlike my previous 2 large $TQQQ on red days, I did not buy early. The reason I did not buy early this time, was because I started watching the VIX.
If the VIX is spiking and the markets are making new lows, I know that you cannot guess the bottom and have to wait for it to form. On StockTwits, I saw people "guessing" the bottom around $47, and then the stock drops to $46, then $45, then $44. It dipped under $44 a bit but started to bounce back up, and the VIX looked like it had potential to drop, so I knew right then it was time to execute my plan.
However, my plan was to avg down into dips, and considering the markets just made fresh new lows going back to earlier this year, I was not going to swing for the fences, get all sized in and be unable to add to my position if it kept on dropping (which it could have easily). As a result, I had a tiny position at the bottom of the dip, quickly sold into the bounce to take the profit, and sat by and watched the move I was wanting to catch be made.
It really sucked missing the trade, since I was looking at up to $2+/shr on 600 shares had I been able to execute my plan, but the dip and bounce happened so fast, and I had no plan to keep avg'ing up, I couldn't react to this new situation I'd not really been in before. I can't complain though, but what felt amazing was not buying early like I have been.
Just being able to identify what you think is the play and it works out exactly how you thought is wonderful, but it happened so fast, and the market was so hectic, I had no chance to really properly execute my plan. Basically, TDAmeritrade couldn't keep up with the way the market was moving, it was just overwhelmed. I'm not blaming ToS for missing the trade, but for the small trade I did hit, I had no idea what was going on because of how out of sync things were.
Anyways, I'm out of day trades in IB until Wednesday and then I get 2. $AAPL earnings is Thursday afterhours and will be very pivotal. I don't want to risk giving back gains for the sake of getting aggressive in a volatile market that is correcting, so I'm trying to pick my trades really carefully. This will mean I'll miss some nice ones, but I at least feel I'll be able to hit something with enough patience.
Since it's the end of the year, we have to watch out for tax loss selling, which if the markets keep going down, a lot of people will be in a world of hurt, but I want to focus on going into 2019 with more of a "investment driven" trading approach on real stocks/etfs and not pennystocks until after 2019 gets underway and some new hot sectors develop.
I'm not going to give up on pennystocks, but right now I want to focus on my year end goal in a way that I feel is more safe and obtainable. As I look at where a lot of stocks are now that I've traded this year, most of them are really in the dumps, and will continue to go lower, so any types of spikes or news usually results in heavy selling for "less of a loss". Knowing that, I just find it hard to take risks on a lot of things right now, so I'm going to try some other things in the mean time.
That's about it. I just wanted to give a status update and post my recent missing trades since the end of Sept. I hope I can continue to progress some more in my trading journey the rest of this year, but I'll just have to see.
Posted Oct 29, 18 7:17 PMbywannabestocktrader
- -33.35 -- VSTMby wannabestocktrader
- -11.35 -- MEETby wannabestocktrader
- -12.90 -- BSTIby wannabestocktrader
- 11.10 -- TQQQby wannabestocktrader
- -31.70 -- ZIOPby wannabestocktrader
- 5.42 -- GNCby wannabestocktrader
- 16.57 -- TQQQby wannabestocktrader
- 41.10 -- TQQQby wannabestocktrader
- 18.99 -- QQQby wannabestocktrader
- 52.18 -- TQQQby wannabestocktrader
- 132.00 -- TQQQby wannabestocktrader
- 46.45 -- VSTMby wannabestocktrader
- 4.11 -- TQQQby wannabestocktrader
- -6.80 -- APRNby wannabestocktrader
- 19.90 -- HSGXby wannabestocktrader
- -62.90 -- VSTMby wannabestocktrader
- 670.39 -- TQQQby wannabestocktrader
- 18.10 -- TQQQby wannabestocktrader
- 374.35 -- TQQQby wannabestocktrader
- 2.15 -- GERNby wannabestocktrader
- -35.90 -- VSTMby wannabestocktrader
- 156.10 -- AVEOby wannabestocktrader
maybe, just maybe I can give you some good advice, if you want you can contact me on TW @TraK_30
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