I thought this morning that I would take advantage of the market sell off and buy some of the stocks that took big hits but were high up on my buy list. I put stops on SPAR, TIE and KRSL. I’m not feeling positive about my purchases after the market shot up nearly a percent it is back down to zero at 9:20 am. I think I jumped in a little too quickly and it may hurt me. Kirk said this morning “While things look positive in the early going, I'd be very careful when putting cash to work. If anything, strength here should be used to reposition and to reduce your risk exposure if you haven't already done so.” I should have listened.

BIG TIME SUCK

Another crummy day. The market took a big hit early on and I sold just about everything. I should have waited on TIE. I’m guessing it will come back by the end of the week. We’ll see.
This ended up being the worst day in 5 years for the market. Everything was off 3% or more. I lost 2%, so I did OK. I can’t be too upset about how I handled things. I would have come out better if I hadn’t bought stocks with unsettled funds so that I could have moved on things a little quicker.

A Sucky Day

Lost quite a bit today, but my ZZ #1 screen lost more. I had pretty tight stops on PCP and CRDN. They worked well for CRDN and we’ll have to see about PCP. I shouldn’t have jumped so soon into TIE and HDNG. I set stops at 15 cents or a little more. I had indications that the market was pulling back a bit, but I ignored them. That was my biggest mistake today.

Just Calm Down, Punk

I’m trying to calm my trading down a bit. I want to be able to go the entire week without managing my portfolio. It seems like the more I manage it, the worse I do. It isn’t necessary for me to do any trading on Monday morning. I can just set up stops (or limits) on Sunday and allow things to work out by themselves. I’d probably do better that way anyway.

Take yesterday for example. I jumped into KRSL after it had gone up over 10%. I probably could have got in at half that if I had a dumb stop on it. My emotions got the best of me as I saw the thing go near 13% (I’ve got to get in now before it heads to 20%!!) and then I watched the thing drop all the way back down to 1%.

I’m becoming much more disciplined in my trading and I think that has paid off very well. My goal should be to phase out my active trading so that I can manage things from another job. I think that will help me become even more disciplined.

UGLY

I don't know what ugly is doing over there at Uglychart. He seems to have designed some software to do the trading for him based on chart patterns. Where's the fun in that Ugly? There is still a lot to read on his site and I enjoy his sense of humor in a sometimes humorless obsession.

Friday was a bit horrible. AMK declined nearly 30% before 9:00. I saw the signs of it premarket. I had a bad feeling about things the night before and realized I should have sold. I had several reasons:

1. A gut feeling of impending doom
2. The stock no longer qualified(for me)on the MACD (it had just gone below 0)
3. Friday was the day they announced their financial results.
4. The stock had been sputtering for about a week.
5. The stock was so thinly traded (averaging about 24,000 per day) that I knew my tight (3%) stop probably wouldn’t work.

All of my nightmares came true that morning. The good thing was that I was able to hold on until late afternoon when the stock started to rally back. I ended up saving myself about 12% by waiting and not panicking. Things could have gone the other way of course, but I’m glad they didn’t. I learned a lesson with this one and I need to be more cautious next time.