Well, where do I begin...This past week has been horrible in so many ways and I know 90% of it is because of me and the way I've been doing things. I'm not going to trade at the open anymore because a lot of it is the public either pushing or pulling the market one way or the other and then by around 8:30-9:30 PST it starts finding a direction. Maybe I'm just pulling this out my ass right now or trying to find some excuse as to why I suck at trading. But, I'll sit down to trade around 7-7:30 PST and let the opening quirks get worked out.
I'm way too aggressive with entering stocks. Problem is I feel like I'll miss an opportunity if I don't take it. Fact is, there's opportunities all the time and who cares if I'm watching a stock and it moves without me. I'd rather miss an opportunity than get into a stock and have it tank, haha, which has happened to me 3 or 4 times. I'm still totally new at this. One thing I haven't been doing is learning from my mistakes because I feel like I'm making the same mistakes over and over.
My entry and exit's aren't detailed or clearly defined. Which is probably contributing to my volatile equity curve. My mind seems to jump from one pattern to another, to one technique to another. I know there's no holy grail and I'm not looking for one. I'm just trying to find some edge in the market that's profitable over the long run, because what I'm doing now is basically throwing money away. Now that I re read that sentence it probably does sound like I'm looking for a holy grail. I almost felt like throwing my hands up and saying duck it, I can't do this.
I'm extremely under capitalized and I'm sure that's also destroying my odds of success. The profit I do make barely covers commission. The trade I made today would of made a profit but I didn't sell because I still would of lost cash even though my account showed a profit because of commission. Yada yada, just more complaining. I think I might paper trade and save what little cash I have left and use that time to develop a sound strategy and come back when I'm confident.
Again, I'm still learning and still trying to develop a strategy. I'd love to be able to back test my ideas but I have no idea how to program. If anyone's reading this and knows how to back test, let me know. I'd like to bounce some ideas off you.
Mhh.. what else. I read a book called Techniques of Tape Reading and I remember reading a small blurb about volume and price action. I came back over to my PC and spent about 5 hours looking over charts trying to find these patterns. Basically, I was looking for stocks that had a gigantic volume spike and price was in a downtrend. I was figuring that the public finally capitulated and gave up and would be a good time to get in now. Well, I found about 6 and 1 of these this morning ran up 14% (COSI). I was looking at LSI, HOV, UWN, CC, TARR. All had big spikes and were in downtrends. Yet, I didn't trade it, Because I got in on HOV early, like an idiot. I got sucked into all the morning hype and threw money away.
I wasn't planning on writing this much and I'm sure there's a lot of grammar errors but whatever, I just needed to get these thoughts out of my head.
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