I actually pulled up all 22 charts from last week and made notations on each of them – but I will spare you and not post all of them. One of my main takeaways is that I’m chasing too much. Before going in, I decided to finally check out RSI(2) as a tool. Here are some commentaries on RSI(2) by Muddy, MarketSci and TradingMarkets. In short, a RSI using two days (2) may be better at detecting short-term trends than at the traditional fourteen day (14) intraveral. In general, a reading over 90 would mean overbought conditions, and under 10 would mean oversold conditions. In theory, one would want to avoid longs / enter shorts when overbought, and avoid shorts / enter longs when oversold. I haven’t really found a lot of reading about using RSI(2) intraday for day trading, but I assume the the same dynamic could hold true on short-time frame charts as it would on a daily chart, to the extent and limits that any indicator can be helpful, accurate and not too lagging or prone to false signals.

When looking at my trades this past week – at least over 80% of the time – I was buying stocks when RSI(2) was over 90 (oversold), and shorting them when RSI(2) as under 10 (overbought). I think this is a reflection of my “chasing” a move, rather than buying on pullbacks (when RSI will go lower) and shorting on rips (when RSI will spike). The most come result of this pattern is that I get stopped out because of my commitment to cut my losers, and then only to have the stock move after I’m exited in the direction that I anticipated. So going forward, I am going to experiment using RSI(2) to better time my entries and exits.

Here are the charts and links to the posts about the days. If i have time later, I will write up some more notes on each chart.

MONDAY
– BTE ~ long

TUESDAY – PLD ~ short

WEDNESDAY – TIBX ~ long

THURSDAY – RRD ~ short

FRIDAY – PDLI ~ LONG