This morning I had AXL, HRZ, and HMA on my watchlist as stocks with nice day range swings lately. One of my goals was to get in more than three paper trades just to scale up that in practice. Several things from today:

  • Overall, I’m up more than $500 in my paper trading but this is cut in half by commissions. This makes it clear that if you are going to be actively trading you need to have the best commission fees possible.
  • I plan to either open up a $25K account with Interactive Brokers in like March (and trade with only half of it), or fund like five accounts with $3K at different brokers in January – all with the goal of avoiding not being limited to three day trades every five days.
  • Because TOS’s Paper Money doesn’t allow you to short many stocks, I decided to use a virtual coin flip with a 50% chance of getting shares to borrow. I think this is more realistic to either having an account at IB or at multiple brokers. In Paper Money, I just have to go the traditional route of buying and selling and inverting these results on some of my short trades.
  • I have to be more careful in my ordering logistics, several times I almost put in sell limit orders when I wanted to put in stop orders, or almost didn’t click the box for the cheaper commission fee.
  • I need to balance closely monitoring my stocks on watch with paying attention to alerts in the chat room or on Twitter. Today, when AXL made a move I was checking out stocks shared in the chat room.

I went short on GGP and BC when they looked weak in the morning after run-ups yesterday or today. However, right around then the DOW started to head up, and it was good I got out both as these as they ended up going up $.30 each quickly. AXL did a nice 10/60 SMA cross continuing up from yesterday’s close, and I got in at $1.55, which was a little late for a stock on the top of my watch list – $1.45 would of been better if I had been paying attention. I did exit properly at $1.70 as that has been resistance lately, and it went down from there. HTZ spiked at the same time, and Tort/Adam in chat gave an alert and I got in at $3.07 (after it broke the magical $1 threshold). This one I had trouble selling and getting my order filled, and I got out $.05 less than than $1.19, where I wanted to exit. HSNI was a Muddy alert in chat. It went down quickly and bounced off $2.00 but there wasn’t alot of other signs this was going to go up, especially for getting in at $2.04 rather than at like $1.90. The exit order on this one also didn’t get filled as I wanted and was nearly a dime less than my first sell order. Here is the chart on AXL: