Feb 29, 2008

A few trades

The bad:
MLNM - I shorted this stock on a break of the 10:30 bar off the 10-min chart. I knew about the strong first bar, I knew about bars 3 and 4 and yet, after entering and price worked against me... did I exit for a small loss??? No, I took a full hit. I need to start grading my trades and plan my exits around the grade. So, say it's a scale of 1 to 3 with 1 being the worst... I would look to exit or partial at the first sign of trouble. Need to work on this.
 
The good:
CMED - dropped like crazy from the open. But it started basing below the ORL on the :15 and I entered short off a break of the 11:15 bar low. Price action was really crazy so even though the chart looks steady... it was a wild ride. I bailed at $46.
 


 
CTSH - this was just the happy little stock that was willing to cooperate... never make me sweat and slowly ease its pretty little bars all the way down to my price target. Entered short off a break of the 11:45 bar low (15-min) which was a failed reversal setup. Exited at the fib. ext.
 

16 comments:

Jerry said...

Great trades. Too bad I don't have those on my scan.

OONR7 said...

jerry: thanks, got 'em all off my prophet scan.

Jerry said...

Hmm, I have the same prophet setting. Wonder why... Well, can't have them all.

anarco said...

Congrats on another good day!
You may have covered it in your site already but I cannot find what software you use for scans. Do you use the free prophet scan? Also, if you do not mind, it would be nice to know your settings.
Thanks in advance!

Anonymous said...

ALNY or ANLY PB'ed t othe 38% retrace afetr gapping up. so what did i do? i starting thinking: "the market is so weak, i dont want to go long." the stock rocked off that level & i flubbed the price input on a second trade and got taken out .25 early.

i still seem to make one small mistake a day that is just plain DUMB!

Anonymous said...

forgot. i watched FCN PB to the OR close price and then continue higher. Trader-X took longs on down days & i will too from now on.

OONR7 said...

jerry, anarco: here are my gap scan settings for prophet.net. I'm a silver member. I also sometimes use IB's scanner and/or the pre-market gap list from Jamie. Although... I've been sticking with the prophet list lately:

Gap up
•Exchanges: NYSE AMEX NASDAQ(NM,SC,OTC,BB)
•Last Price is at least 5
•Today's Open Price is at least 0.01 dollars higher than the Previous High and the Open Price is at least 1.50% higher than the Previous Close
•Average Volume is at least 500,000 shares
•Percent Change is more than 1.50%

Gap down
•Exchanges: NYSE AMEX NASDAQ(NM,SC,OTC,BB)
•Last Price is at least 5
•Today's Open Price is at least -0.01 dollars lower than the Previous Low and the Open Price is at least -1.50% lower than the Previous Close
•Average Volume is at least 500,000 shares
•Percent Change is less than -1.50%

OONR7 said...

qqqball: I try not to look at what the market is doing as I'm trading (but sometimes it's hard to avoid). Like you, I sometimes weigh my decisions based on the market action and sometimes that works (especially on strong trending days). Overall, if a chart looks good intraday and it's contradicting the overall market tone, just make sure it's a great setup and also check the daily chart for confirmation. Maybe reduce risk size so that if you are wrong... it won't hurt too much. FCN (5-min) definitely tempted me yesterday but I decided to pass (bad move).

TraderAm said...

Yesterday the DOW went down 315 points. A long gapper on my watchlist was JRJC. This had a perfect long entry on 15min chart, but i just ignored it...

TraderAm said...

00nr7.

Do you use Trade Ideas Scan at all ? Just wondered how it compares with Prophet scan.

Thanks

anarco said...

Hi 00NR7~
Thanks very much for sharing your prophet scan settings! (I have saved that info for future reference.) I was a stockcharts.com user, but I did not like the service very much (I know that many folks love it). I also wanted to ask you, like TraderAm, if you know anything about the Trade Ideas gap scans. I am asking because the real time Prophet service is around $49, and the Trade Ideas is around $70. The thing is that if both scan services are similar, Trade Ideas might have an edge since they offer so many other scans throughout the day.
Thanks in advance!

OONR7 said...

traderam, anarco: I have used Tradeideas in the past but I really couldn't find a reason to justify the increased cost. While they do have pre-set patterns I found that I automatically scan my stocks anyway so the added scan within Tradeidea didn't offer any real benefit.

Anonymous said...

NR007 - thanks for sharing that you passed FCN. i compounded it by not shorting into the 2T (double top) intraday. the first high had massive volume & the second push had high probabilitty to fail. i had held SGR short & DUG long (i got out w/in pennies of the HOD - like 38,18 i think), so i was kinda looking to coast into the close.

my scans were wiped out by IQChart glich. i need to re-write them this weekend. you guys are getting better set-ups on stocks im not aware of.

Anonymous said...

OO,

In your Prophet scans, you dropped the VV% criteria ? I used to think that was the best feature of their scan. My Silver subscription did not survive their price hike :-) I still use the free version of the scan without Realtime Data.

OONR7 said...

anon - nice catch. While I don't include it in my scan... I do look at VV% in the results (I actually sort them that way). I just found that sometimes stocks may take a while to get going (after the first half hour) and that VV criteria was limiting some candidates.

greytrader said...

Sorry about the Anon,
You have to login now to set your name.

Greytrader