Tuesday, October 7, 2008

My biases messed me up today

Today could have been a pretty good day if I had stuck to the plan. I took 4 trades all of which could have made money had I managed them correctly. Instead I let my bias about the market being too oversold control my trading. It hurt me in the end, but fortunately I lost only .84R for the day. Let's take a look at my mistakes:


I made money on TIF, but I got out too soon. I was too worried about the market turning around like it did yesterday. I wanted to protect my profits and I moved up my stop too soon. Could have made 3.66R.
I had my stop set too tight on SRE. After I made 1R I set my stop at break even. I stopped out and the stock went on to my target. I could have made 8.25R.

XRAY just didn't go my way. It never got up to +1R and hovered around break-even before losing .80R.

I missed a decent trade on this one (1st pattern in blue). I instead bought at the 20EMA bounce and quickly got killed stopping out with a 1.11R loss. This was a pretty dumb trade that I made because I thought the market would end positively today.

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