Stevie
With the DOW up 216 points, how could it be possible that all my positions were moving simply sideways today? Other than for a few hiccups of movement here and there on my screen today, there just wasn’t much going on–at least with my trades anyway. Boring. Get up, do squats, sit down, check my trades. Check the weather forecast. Rinse and repeat. Check in at Stocktwits and Finviz. Get up, do squats, sit down, check my trades.
This is the market. So why was I on the sidelines without a dance partner? Was everyone having fun but me?
Today was just one of those flat days, when nothing seemed to be moving. Even Trader Scott was a little bored. Too bad we don’t share an office as I’m sure we would have played our share of waste paper basketball or thrown bologna slices up onto the ceiling to see who could stick the most. Yeah….it WAS that bad.
But wait — Isn’t there over 1.46 billion shares traded daily from more than 2800 companies just on the NYSE alone? With all that action, why wasn’t I getting any?
I actually know this answer and reminded myself of it: If you want something, you need to go fishin’.
We do this to ourselves in the markets when we take positions or add to the few on our watchlist, you know, those same ones you’ve been watching forever. We get attached and comfortable with them. And they might be being kind to us by not creating much drama with our account, but they’re just sitting there content to just be. It’s fine for those long term relationships, those nice investments, but not for those positions you take because you just know, any day they’re going to the moon when most probably they won’t. At least any time soon.
So after I whined about my boredom to Trader Scott , he then reminded me of something that I say often “I don’t ALWAYS have to be in the market”, I then reminded him of my daily quota because yes, this is my job. And although I don’t have a boss, my approach to trading is of a professional nature. In short, I had to get into something that was going to move or preferably something already on the move so I decided to go fishing.
It’s amazing, all the tools at our fingertips that get easily overlooked during the day. All those handy, dandy stock screeners included in our trading platforms that report everything from bullish candlestick patterns to moving average breakouts to downside indicators. I opened up my screener and got to work as fast as I could. Stocks on the Move–sounds good to me. A little momentum was exactly what I needed so I plugged away as fast as I could, entering symbol after symbol until I found something suitable. I scratched my first trade after taking a position; the momentum just wasn’t there. But I found another and jumped in for a quick .20/share scalp. It felt good and I felt good that I got pro-active.
Did I meet my quota? No, of course not. But it taught me something I’ll use tomorrow and that’ll be that I’ll work harder and not wait for someone to ask me to dance. And I’ll start fishing earlier because as much as I like doing squats, toned thighs don’t pay the bills.
Ditto, should have of held on to TQQQ.
It really depends on what you want from the trade. I like to get in and out of trades that are moving so if it stalls or even dips even slightly below what I bought it for, I’ll get out. If I’m long on a stock, I’ll sell 1/2 into a high and then buy back on the dips. A lot of it is intuition also.