tradersams blog

Market still choppy and a bit ugly at the moment.  Driving me out – how long this lasts is anyone’s guess.

Before getting into tonights commentary, I have to comment on this article in the Wall Street Journal. Fancy that – we have price volatility and there is a view that traders should be stopped – I wonder if there will be more talks like I heard a while ago referring to retail traders effectively losing the right to buy, and therefore leaving all the transactions to funds to manage.  Hmmmm…. me thinks I could comment on those with vested interests maybe trying to protect their patch.  Oh well – maybe this discussion will just go away.

chc 9-7-09

CHC: exited today after falling through stop loss for a 13% loss.  Looking at this trade I had a number of opportunities to exit the trade that I did not take – and the unfortunate bit is that I would have been in a better financial position if I had.  It was clear the price was falling on the big black candle the week after I opened the trade, after which the price has declined every day.  I do note however that the price has not fallen as fast as my other positions that were closed out earlier.

The actual error I made in this trade is however my exit today.  The stop loss was actually triggered the day before yesterday, and I failed to exit cleanly… a slow exit….I thought I might be able to get an extra cent so put my sell order in at a level that was never filled – leading to a worse position to exit from today.

The learning -> when the stop is hit, take it – don’t second guess it.

mml 9-7-09

MML: entered a long position in Medusa Mining today.  The reasons for entry are:

• looking for the gap a couple of days ago to become support
• share price is at all time highs
• my ATR based exit formula seems to be tracking to the price fairly nicely
• volume has been healthy over the last few months

Note – all my entry and exit prices are sent on twitter as I note that they have taken place.  Sometimes I don’t know if a transaction has taken place as I  don’t know until I get email confirmation, due to the fact that I can’t observe the intraday prices in general.

Any queries of comments to me, feel free to post…