Sep 28, 2007

HAR - Long

What a difference a couple of days make. In hindsight, going 0 for 5 Tuesday was probably a good thing. It helped me re-focus on volume and remind me how important it is to my system. Not saying I won't make mistakes in the future, but I like how I was able to spot a divergence, make changes and see positive results. I traded HAR and ACN today. I was shaken out of ACN (5-min) at the ORH for a gain before it proceeded to jump up and through the ORH and tag the intraday fib. ext. With both HAR and ACN, my entries were made off of inverted hammers. Jamie uses these a lot and it makes sense. It's a bar that demonstrates the bears tried to take over but the bulls were still in charge. So, if the high is broken on the next bar it's kinda like the bulls telling the bears to piss off. Or something like that :)
Here's the HAR trade:

  • Nice, strong first bar
  • Price retraced down to the 61.8% fib. level (gee, so weird how that always happens :)
  • I really wanted to enter off a break of the 10:50 bar high as it was an inside nr7 hammer with low volume, but it wasn't above the 38.2% fib. level so I waited
  • Entered long on a break of the 11am bar high (inverted hammer) on increased volume
  • Speaking of volume, the spike on the 10:40 bar showed me the bulls were interested and the increased volume on my entry bar basically confirmed it (at least that's how I interpreted it)
  • Exited at the beginning of the 1pm bar as I didn't want to risk giving back my gains (a doji formed on the 15-min chart too). If I stayed in the position, my new stop would've been on a break of the 12:50 bar low but I didn't want to risk losing .30 on a hunch... plus, I had to go out and get dinner

30 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice trade.

I traded HAR on the 15 and got stopped out for a 1R gain.

OONR7 said...

nice... I was targeting the fib. ext. at 87.83 but there was a lot of resistance at 87.50. You can see the upper tails as it approaches 87.50.

Anonymous said...

I got out at 87.42 after two NR7 on the 15. I was hoping to make it to the 119% fib which is 87.89 but it did not work out. It is tanking right now...

OONR7 said...

heck, you should've shorted :)

Anonymous said...

Yeah, no reversing for me :-)
My alarm for NYSE Tick < -1000 has sounded a few times, elephants are selling right now.

Jerry said...

I watched both HAR and CHL and just let it slip away from me.

Let me know how the API with IB work out if you get it working.

TJ said...

OONR7,

Love the inverted hammer rationale.

OONR7 said...

jerry: I downloaded today and then something weird happened with TWS. I downloaded a newer version of TWS and determined I really don't need an API to pull the scans. Takes about 1 minute to export, copy and paste.

Anonymous said...

great exit! no fix priced meals after that trade.

QQQBall

Anonymous said...

inverted hammers - see that action alot when inverted hammer (usually with healthy sized real body) is the second bar after a green bar off of a reversal. so Bar #1 is a shaved top (no wick or shadow), Bar #2 gaps up and runs and then PBs and leaves a kinda hammer, then Bar #3 takes out the high and really moves.

QQQBall

OONR7 said...

qqqball: fixed priced meals... I like that!

Anonymous said...

OONR7:
I'm using TWS too and wrote a little VB script (mainly base on the samples they provided) to scan the stocks that from a list (txt file) and looking for gappers with a given gap up/down percentage.
I can share with you if you want.

-Min

Anonymous said...

test

Anonymous said...

oonr7 nice stuff,
i had bunch of lousy Nasdaq gappers (many faded) but couldn't decide (VRTX,FTEK,BCS,VRTX,FLEX,JRJC,COGN,TSL etc)
I don't see any premarket data (from 8-9.30 AM)
Do you hide that in your QT. what is the significance of that?
thx

John S. said...

Like the inverted hammer theory as well, but could you tell me the difference between that one and the shooting star. .

Thanks

OONR7 said...

min: I'm certainly open to using that script. Thank you.

anon: yes, I did see a lot of fades. They touched their fib. ext. quickly and I removed from my list. As for pre-market data... some people look at it, some people don't. I'm one that doesn't. I look at stocks that gap at the open and I would imagine that most of the time the stocks on my gap list were pre-market movers... so why waste my time????

john s: Shooting star looks very similar to an inverted hammer except it's typically a down bar and occurs at the top of an uptrend. Shooting stars are very bearish so I also like using it during base and breaks.

Anonymous said...

I wouldn't like to be the party crasher, but imo this was a bad trade with a good outcome.
The 5th bar is too red, too big and vol is relatively strong, after that the whole move up is on declining vol and moreover it was a "bad" gap, meaning it gapped into a territory it visited only a few days ago.
I didn't come here to bash and most of the times u have indeed great setups, but this time i think you got more luck than brains...(hey, who said it's wrong? ;) )

OONR7 said...

anon: the overall volume was much higher than average. The volume of the first 3 bars was very high compared to the volume of bars 3-4. Price hammered out clear support right at the 61.8% level. Volume on bar 8 was significantly more than the previous 2 and my entry bar was also on increased volume. All signs looked like the bulls won control and that's what happened.
You state that 'the whole move up is on declining vol' and of course I agree... but you don't know that when entering a trade. As for the 'bad' gap. You know, I don't look that far back when entering trades but if I did I might argue that it actually 'filled' the gap and the previous pivot point was 85.65 which price clearly exceeded. Plus, as I mentioned before price hammered out nice intraday support at 85.88... which is still above the previous pivot point.
Did luck have anything to do with this??? Maybe so, no one has the answer to that, but I didn't enter the trade hoping to get 'lucky'.

Anonymous said...

I guess anon followed his logic, went short and was unlucky :-)

You ended up with his money.

What is it with these anonymous posting anyway ?

OONR7 said...

gt: I don't know... guess some folks don't want to fill out the info. At least QQQBall ends with... well, QQQBall. I always get a laugh when someone writes an anon comment slamming a blogger or something. I mean, why don't you just fake a name anyway??? Have some real fun with it.

Anonymous said...

On another subject, I think Kernan from tradethemove.com and Trader X might be the same person. I noticed Kernan524 as the username on realtick windows in tradethemove material and back in 2005, a few of Trader X charts had Kernan524 as a user. Guess he forgot to remove them. Kernan also pushed Trader X blog on the elite trader site.

Nothing wrong with that, I bought the tradethemove material and learned a lot from it. It is funny that they both did interviews on stocktickr (Kernan and Trader X), the only thing in common is that they were both from Texas.

Regardless, I miss his blog, learned a lot from it.

OONR7 said...

gt: I'm Trader X.

Anonymous said...

LOL :-)
And all this time I thought you were Victoria !

OONR7 said...

well, many said Trader X was Victoria :)

Seriously, the Kernan connection is interesting.

Rudy said...

Anon: Luck is when probability favors a change in trend, but outcome is proven wrong, and you are "lucky" to exit with a small loss.

Fortune favors the brave, not the timid. The difference is risk management.

Nice trade 00nr7!. Rudy

OONR7 said...

rudy: luck is when you enter a trade without a gameplan or solid reasoning/experience and the trade ends well. I could spot and trade the HAR setup every time I saw it. Love the 'fortune' comment... so true.

Anonymous said...

i had a Google acc't but it got messed up.. so i post this way and avoid teh account b.s.

ive considered buyint the tradethemove stuff. anyone not like it?

QQQBall

Anonymous said...

QQQBall,

You can select other iof Anonymous and post as QQQBall.

Tradethemove stuff is good. I think it is worth the money. If you mostly day trade Trader X style, you probably do not need more. If you want to use Fib and EMAs for longer time frames for Swing or Core trades then definitely get the ebook.

OONR7 said...

qqqball: If you like the way I use the fib. lines, you'll love tradethemove. For me, after I reviewed the updated materials released earlier this year... it changed the way I trade.

OONR7 said...

this comment is just to get me up to 30 comments :)