An encouraging day

Man, I wish my money wasn't pretend today. I made a "virtual" 7.8R.

Here is an example of one of my "trades". I bought at $33.75 with a stop at $33.55 which risked 20 cents per share. I sold at $35.44 which is a difference of $1.69 per share. That's a gain of 8.45 times my risk.

Since the money was pretend, I made some boneheaded trades just to get a feel for what works and what doesn't. So far, stocks that are under $10.00 have been really hard to make any money on. I find I get stopped out rather quickly.


I also practiced scaling out of my trades today, and two of them paid off well. AMZN was up 10R when I "sold" part of the position. The stock came down pretty hard after that. I pretended to sell a position in BBY as well and that would have paid off as the stock came back down.

I'm trying to find a broader indicator to let me know when to take profits. Since I'm trading in the direction of the indexes, I'm toying with the idea of selling when the trend in the index loses strength (like when the 20 period EMA is crossed).

I'm still learning, but I've been encouraged so far.