Archive for the ‘mcc’ Tag
today – mcc – other notes
mcc close
MCC: Closed my position in Macarthur Coal today at 9.33 for a 9% loss.
Closed as the share made a lower high, and definite weakness has shown since the long term high was made when I entered the position. Looking at my entry when I opened the trade, I did note that momentum appeared to be dropping over the last few months – which seems to have held true this last week.
In general the market is struggling over the last few sessions as seems to be getting a lot of write ups around the traps. Time for me to look harder at my recent trades and trying to find some improvements.
When looking for improvement, there are heaps of resources to read, study and analyse – both in my library, the internet, the bookshop and of course examination of the charts I pay data subscribers to maintain. Reviewing past trades is a great place to start. Looking at the blog by the Trading Goddess there is a posting with ‘10,000 hours’, which describes the skills the greatest traders have – read it here. 10,000 hours is a term describing the number of hours it takes a person to learn a skill. This is a concept used by Mr Bighit at 5000 trades.
Review an earlier trade
Toll holdings revisited
TOL: recently exited, and I mentioned that I would review the trade with a view towards re-entry.
So I was looking at this recently in terms of breaking through the resistance at the tree recent tops. A few more days of data and the graph looks more like we’ve had a head and shoulders, at the top of the recent rise – and the last days trade is a break of the neck-line. Head and Shoulders or not – we have a lower low, lower high – so downtrend emerging. A look at the momentum shows that dropping also.
All in all – I closed the last entry stating that I still believed my original analysis that I entered on and was looking to go long again. Looks like the bears have this one, and shorts are the way to go.
The ASX 200
XJO - ASX200
The graph above is the ASX 200 as of friday. This does look like a change may be developing. I have followed these rising curves for a while now, however looking at the last day or so – we might have fallen out of the third rising curve… which whilst not meaning much, is a tap on the shoulder for me… lower lows, lower highs, change in character.
I note I have hit another stop over the weekend, and I am very close to a few others. With the US market being down 2% on friday, I suspect I’m about to get hammered. Shorts may be the way to go.
Know yourself
I have now done a search over my recent trades. You can tell I have been a bit lazy (in effect anyway, busy on non trading activities) as I have been trading what I can best describe as a small share universe. I am in and out of the same shares fairly constantly lately.
Possibly because of the ‘easy market’ we’ve been tracking since March or so…? Ease seems to have bred complacency in me. I’m not scanning the whole market – I’m going with what I know. Looking through a lot of charts today, I am trading sections of the market, and the upward trends and volatility are happening elsewhere.
So – know thyself – recognise the laziness coming into the trades, and plan to fix it. I can’t speak for the future – I may keep going as I am going until I get a chance to sit down and change direction, or I might just wind back the market commitment until I can get time to review the whole market and picking an area (and a direction) to chase.
Wrapping up
In summary – a rambly sort of post, covering a few areas. The rambly nature itself probably indicates my distracted nature at the moment. Sooo many distractions, Christmas shopping, major project on the go at my real job, getting used to new charting software.
Anyway – if anything here is of interest please post a comment below, or feel free to subscribe!
today – open mcc, close cpb
mcc open
MCC: Opened a position in Macarthur Coal today at $10.20. The share made a new high for the year when I was entering, but has since subsided into the close of the day. Volume was good today (double yesterday), so all in all a reasonable looking entry.
Counting against this entry is the observation that this share looks to have lost some of its momentum over the last 3 months or so – maybe this new high will change that… maybe it wont.
Campbell Brothers - 4 entries, 1 exit
CPB: Closed my position in Campbell Brothers today at 26.99 for a 15% profit by the time you take into account all the entries I made when pyramiding.
You can see in the pink circle the effect of the capital raising, which has stalled the price action in its tracks. The fourth entry, shown as the low down green blob is the entry point of the shares collected via the capital raising.
Fairly straight forward trade, stuck to the plan for the first bit, a momentary panic when I had to think how I would react to the capital raising, and then (new plan under the arm) I traded the second half according to my updated plan.
To date I have not updated my plan with how to deal with this situation, as I wont hit it too often, and looking at a few over the years, I have had some capital raisings that have treated me well – and some have been a disaster. You can see above the plan in this case simply involved resetting my ATR based stop loss when the price stabilised.
today – close mcc, mre
mcc close
MCC: Closed the position in Macarthur Coal at 8.30 for 11% gain. Followed this plan well – MCC has been good to me (not that it cares a toss about me!) and I will continue to watch. Trailing stop loss plan has been effective for this, but I did expect to get the target at the medium term resistance you can see marked in the diagram
mre close
MRE: Closed the position in Minara Resources today at $0.92 for an 11% loss. This is unfortunate as the share was a winner for a fair period of time before it dipped into loss territory. I passed off on the first exit point (penciled in green) as the share fell below the trendline I had drawn – this has proven to be a mistake. I took the exit today after the share closed last night below my stop loss line.
Anyway ttfn – a hard to read week this week – I can see some long and short positions. Lets see what happens in the US tonight and I may place some positions before going to my real job in the morning.
today – open mcc, wsa, fxj
mcc open
MCC: Pyramided into my position in Maccarthur Coal. I had an entry set before the market to enter when the resistance line was penetrated. In this case it looks like resistance held, and this may prove to be a poor entry. Time will tell.
WSA: Opened a new position in Western Areas – agin bought on finding new highs just to drop back in later trade. There is an uptrend in place with this share, however it comes off the boil a bit.
wsa open
FXJ: Opened a new position in this share. The longer term graph looks like a solid base has been formed over an extended period, and now the share seems to be climbing out of it. The recent rounded bottom was mirrored in the volume (sketched in green below), with increasing volume as the price pressed through the last most higher high in mid-June. I expect this to be a better longer term performer.
fairfax open
All in all, not really happy with my entries today – the first two triggered based on a very strong market opening today, but now the trades are in – trade the plan!!
today – cpb – updates on open positions
Filed under: discretionary | Tags: aru, chc, cpb, mcc, mml, okn, open
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Campbell Brothers opening
CPB: I set a trigger to enter Campbell Brothers over the weekend, on entry into the rectangle you can see in the attached diagram.
Campbell Brothers has been in an uptrend over the medium term, however ranging over the shorter term. The item of interest that peaked my interest in this share was the bounce off the upwards trend line, which I am looking for a continuation of.
So, I have a couple of trades that have been open for a few days, hopefully indicative of some trends setting in – not that I’ll know till I can look back and know. The writeups below are brief updates on a few of my open positions. you can find the entry conditions by looking of the relevant tags on the menu.
ARU: Only opened recently, strong increase on open – definite rejection of a higher high, but no stops hit.
aru
CHC: Charter Hall group, again only recently entered, and signs of stalling as the overhead resistance is approached. Keep a close eye.
chc
MCC: Continued to rise nicely since opening. Today looks like a push into, and maybe through upper resistance. Keep the trailing stop loss, keep watching.
mcc
MML: Medusa Mining also rose nicely. Another one to hit upper resistance, lets see if we press through. Hold position.
mml
OKN: Pyramided in to this trade based on the sudden increase in price, and the share promptly declined soon after. As it stayed above the increasing trend line I stayed in. In some cases I would have exited on the fall through the ATR based stop loss (brown line), however based on the strong uptrend I held in using the trendline as the ultimate stop due to the sudden spike which I missed capitalising on as I was working on end of day prices.
okn
For anyone interested – one more week to get into the ASX sharemarket game. I’m considering myself, but I don’t know if I can afford any more time, given I post this blog, consider my trades and hold down a job!
For tonights reading I trawled through some content from Tradergav – another Aus trader with a blog. I read his discussion on a tweets conversation that he has here which is around the risk / reward metrics. Since doing discretionary trading I have not been tracking my statistics as carefully as I was up to a year ago, as I normally tracked these for my System A (which had no triggers this week – again!) and other mechanical systems I have toyed with. Maybe thats my next project, as I have done enough in the last year to give some sort of finding. I had one -3R trade from memory last year and that hurt. If I go past -2R I pause trading and ‘have a good hard look at myself’ to determine why I ended up there. I must say I haven’t beaten 8R in over a year though, and you do (well I do) like to get one every so often, both for financial reasons, as well as to help with the psychology of this.
Signing off,
friday – mcc – weekly summary
End of another week. A good way to end the week though – for music fans Australian radio station JJJ did the ‘Hottest 100 of all time‘ – was great to listen too – and the commentary provided by the DJs as great!
mcc entry, friday
MCC: Macarthur Coal looks to have formed a small scale eve and eve double bottom. I entered this on friday with an entry target set in advance, which may have been a slightly risky entry – however it has closed above the mid point of the pattern, making this a valid double bottom formation. Based on this pattern I have an immediate target of ~$7.50. Over time I have seen resistance between 6.70-7.90. Lets see how this plays out.
Weekly scan for System A – No results.
On another note – what is the impact of negative interest rates? I found an article at the ‘Cumberland Advisors‘ website interesting regarding the Swedish central bank (the Equivalent of the Reserve Bank of Australia) moving to negative interest rates – read more here.
today – roc – mcc
Another down day, and my longs are getting picked off one by one.
roc
ROC signaled an exit on yesterdays close of day price, so closed long position that I pyramided into just the other day, for a 4% loss. (Actually not really true, loss is greater as I don’t take into account transaction costs for the purposes of the blog, and this had high costs due to the multiple entries). As I look at the graph (see to the right), it has fallen to the next support region…
mcc trade
MCC also signaled exit on yesterdays close, so exited on a tidy 23% gain. Again closed near support today. OK trade though this one. I am a bit disappointed in the entry, as I bought in ‘hoping’ to push through the resistance, rather than waiting for confirmation.
This could be short term weakness (likely to be?) but to trade well, cut the losses – go by the chart – and re-enter short or long when the next opportunity arises.
tradersams blog 