First potential profit BBBY

APRN, GTES, and VSTO are some new setups i have orders in for today. I'm quite happy with what I'm seeing now in the pre-market for BBBY. By the looks of it I can probably sell half of my BBBY shares sometimes after 9:45am and then I will put my stop to break-even.

I stopped out on one of my stocks (on the same day) last Friday. Since Interactive Brokers for some reason no longer emails me what positions have been bought and sold at the time of the transaction, I totally forgot about what it was. All I know is that I lost money on that. I will include that in the trade review for the month end.

I am now seeing one limitation of the profit-taking strategy that I am following. It's that, I'm always taking losses at 1x risk but I'm already taking half my profit off at 1x risk which means I'm getting 0.5x risk...trailing the other portion, it would really have to move for me to even reach 1x risk total for the trade. I suppose that will allow me to have profits more consistently. But the math still kinda bugs me.

Any thoughts?

PGTI not moving yet. Hoping for a strong close for the week

PGTI hasn't really moved even an inch. I'm hoping that the positive signs in the futures today will carry over to the day's session.

I have another 4 orders again today with TEN and BBBY I believe part of the orders that didn't get hit yesterday.

I noticed that stocks are either opening weak and then staying weak for the rest of the day. Or strength fades after the first hour or two. I'm not sure if in this environment I should be looking to go long some names but that is what I know how to do so I'm going to stick to that first before going into any attempts at shorting which is tricky for several reasons.

New Position (finally) and some new orders

  

Have a couple of orders in today that will be active at 9:45am. Open doesn't look too good as most of my watchlist is trading lower. No matter, I'm just going to leave these orders on for the rest of the day. 

Yesterday, my order of PGTI was hit. I'm hoping that it will reach my first profit target of 1x risk. Right now it's trading flat. Stop there was low of the day.

Here's a post by Frank Zorilla that resonates quite well with me. Check out his private room on stocktwits:

We do not know or will not know in advance which stock will trigger, which will be the best performer, we won't know which one will be the winners and the losers nor the sequence, more importantly; we don't have to know. Our job is to put the orders in and let the market do what it's going to do.

I always have this anxiety of not being able to pick the best setups that show up on my scans. I have a fear of missing out on these things. So what he's saying here resonates with me a lot. I will not know which stocks will be the winners in advance. If we all knew, then there wouldn't be any trading (lol). At some point, I have to really learn that when I put the orders in, what happens will be out of my control.

Another set of new names

The past two days i've been canceling my orders when I see that they're down by as much as 3% at the open and well past my time trigger. I realized that that will not allow me to participate when the markets are bouncing strongly. So today I am leaving my orders as is until the day ends.

The markets have been pretty weak. Momentum names haven't been following through and pullbacks are pulling back even deeper. I'm just lucky to be in cash right now but I really feel the bounce settling in in the next few days.

A new Round

None of my orders were hit yesterday. So before sleeping, I cancelled them. I think in hindsight had I not cancelled them, some of them would've been hit and then stopped out on the same day.

For today, I decided I'm going to add a "Time in force" parameter to my orders. The theory, well according to some market participants, is that the first 15 minutes of the day are one of the most volatile. I am avoiding that volatility in the first 15 minutes and have the system go live with my orders at around 9:45am.

Hopefully that reduces noise a little bit and prevents me from being stopped out in the first 15 minutes on the session. I just remembered that I am still under the day trading rule (under $25,000 account) and if I executed 5 day trades within a 3 day period (I think) my account will be suspended. Of course I do not want that. That is also my convenient excuse for not forcing another trade to come on the list.

I am not taking in any new names. Just the watchlist that I made from last Sunday is the one that I am using.

Orders in!

Orders in, these are setups inspired by Zor's ideas. All have stop limits at the open. Let's see if I get hit. The risk here is that a volatile day will stop me out around $240 bucks if all my stop losses are hit.

I actually have even more setups to choose from but I decided to limit my positions for now and to pick what I believe are the best setups. As to what those are will ultimately be, I do not know yet but I have to document also the other setups that I did not take as they might be the ones that will move and not these guys.

Watchlist looks like this as of this moment:

Happy with my scans

I subbed to Frank Zorilla's trading room the past week and already I've had a couple of ideas. I'm setting up my scans now, making it simpler.

The idea is that I'm looking for near term momentum and some form of consolidation and just stalk the trade. Buy stop limit orders will be the buy methodology for me. I will adjust orders and manage positions daily.

Feels nice, feels like I have a renewed focus on trading and can't wait to see the results.

RDUS cut

Unfortunately didn't workout for me. The trade initially went in my favor for about an hour but then it closed poorly. It is now consolidating again and I feel I need to get out because my thesis didn't play out the way I wanted it to.

I'm trying out Frank Zorilla's chatroom today. I really want to get ideas on what stocks I should focus on for setups like this one.

Waiting for a Long Breakout for RDUS

I really like this chart, pressure is building up near the highs and the opening price action seems to be good. I have a buy stop limit order at 29.45 with a $1 stop. Hopefully we see some positive price action today, a buck or 2 per share is my target.

AXSM watching this again

Watching this name again because it seems attempting to do a breakout again. I will be entering on the 30 minute time frame, will watch for a setup.

For now this is the only stock that I want in the near term.The others are taking their time.

What I want to happen is a consolidation on the 30 minute timeframe near the highs. Once I get a pocket of consolidation, I will enter there and then see where it goes.

My setups are duds

I set up a watchlist last weekend containing my picks but right now they're still not moving. It looks like I need to change methodologies again for my scans somewhat so I can be where the action is.

I did not take any positions this week but I'm hoping to get some skin in the game by the next. I will be changing my approach to the setups I will be watching out for. Maybe go back to my daily sigma scans :)

Nothing interesting

It's at this point where I either believe there's going to a break to all time highs or it's just going to pull right back inside the range. I'm betting on the latter, the markets seem to be stalling near the highs, which isn't the best bullish sign.

Alternatively, the consolidation near the highs might be seen as building pressure. My watchlist has been getting trimmed lately as the 30 minute charts don't seem to be conducive to any sort of buying at the moment.

I just have to be patient right now and stick to my plan.

Not that SIMPL

I was going to get this but ended up passing on it because the bearish candle at the open. I'm still monitoring this stock for a long but for now I'm stepping aside.

The SPY has been doing great this morning, no sudden sell downs are anything..just yet. I am back on stocktwits looking for ideas from traders that I follow haha

Some SIMPL setups

The SPY has gotten out of the one month range that I've been looking at. I consider this to be bullish and I want to see some more follow through with stocks that have been strong in the last few weeks. It is of course going up against the all time high made last July. I need to be conscious of that when just trying to rein in my expectations when it comes to profit taking.

 

SIMPL is something I think I will get into on Monday in anticipation of a breakout past $30.50 or so. It has been slowly printing out higher lows up against the resistance on the 30 minute chart.

One change I'm making this week is just for me to look at the setups that I wanna look at during the weekend and focus on those that I want to stalk for entry this week. These what are what i'm looking at at the moment with a priority watch on SMPL. 

 

I'm also going to be looking at my "sigma" scan which alerts me to significant movers for the day. I want to stay in the loop on which stocks are flying throughout the week, these could be future setups.

CPRT might be good.. stalking

Waiting for an entry on this one...looks interesting on the 30 minute chart. It was on my watchlist but I didn't expect it to run this fast. It was a quick move to around $79.50. I'm going to be patient here and wait for some sort of pullback or consolidation before entering.

Tired from the Day Job

Did a lot of stuff for work, and I'm just scanning stocks now. I noticed that I'm a little pessimistic when I'm tired and I think that none of the setups are gonna work.

How should I go around this problem?

NOt really feeling it right now.

Quite tempted to take SMPL trade

Markets are still within a chop. Finding hardly any setups as of late except this one. SMPL is consolidating on the 30 minute time frame and looks to be breaking that resistance line. I am inclined to just take the trade now and just experience the consolidation (although that may make me unnecessarily exposed). I have an alert on that resistance line so I'll be ready to take the trade when that happens.

I feel really lazy today, especially when I compare myself to people on stocktwits who seem to have a lot of setups going for them. I am really guilty of doing this in my "free time": looking at what others are doing, how they're doing it, and how much money they made. It's difficult because I don't know if I'm doing the right things in order to be successful at this. This is one of those days when I'm just frustrated that I do not have a setup to buy.

Well good save :)

Well it's a good thing the stock didn't do a fake breakout on the 30 minute chart otherwise it would've stopped me out really quick.

The overall markets remain in a chop. This is one of those times when I feel like i'm not productive enough or I'm not looking for enough setups but there aren't really much to choose from now.

Interesting setup: IOVA

 

I've taken a liking to this setup. On the daily looks like IOVA is pulling back and setting up a pivot point. So I drilled down to the 30 minute chart below:

 

I'm waiting for a strong break of this 30 minute base, with a stop potentially in the $20 area. I think i'm going to put a BLSO on $21.50 or higher. Happy labor day!