I knocked out a bunch of work on Friday instead of trading so I could paper transact today. While I was not challenged with hesitation as I have been recently, for the majority of the morning, I just wasn’t seeing set ups that seemed strong enough to enter. I wasn’t following closely in chat, trying to find my own prospects, but I’m sure there were plenty of plays.

I did have something sneak up on me, maybe worse than fear – boredom. I saw GSAT spiking big in the morning, and instead of buying at the first peak of the morning, I entered at what looked like a pullback at .51, once again better than buying at top of the spike. Also, instead of taking out 2000 shares at this price, I entered with only 1,000 – and even paper trading, this was less stressful. While I was patient for about an hour and half as it crept up a couple pennies, I just got tired of waiting. I even had a trailing stop so that even if it sank back down, I would break even. So after manually ignoring my stop and closing it out, of course it rose to high of day to .66. Ended up with a $30 profit minus commissions. This is silly because there was no reason not to just let it be, with the trailing stop there, but mentally, I wanted to have a clean plate when I transitioned to work mode. This one was NOT a technically ideal set up as there was no crosses, jigginess, volume, news, etc., other than it was looking to hold up over the key half buck threshold.

CVGI appeared to be breaking down as the entire market was clearly in a daily down tread. On this one, there was a 10/60 SMA cross on the 5-min chart, with a clear drop. But it bounced off $1.35 and basically traded sideways the rest of the day. I put in a tight trailing stop on this one too, as my other position on GSAT was still open, and this stop got me out preventing a loss. When this stop was triggered, it was part of the reason I just wanted to clear the decks and I impulsively got out of GSAT too soon after. This was a $10 profit but after a $15 commission was a $5 loss. So I ended up $10 for the day with the pesky commissions factored in.