Swing Trades
Had a near major disaster (albeit virtual) with my weekend swing trades. As I said in an earlier post, I should of sold GM on Friday as the market closed – this was just a bad stock of a company in crisis to hold overnight. This became reality as GM was downgraded to 0 by some analysts and the stock plummeted in pre-market and at open, bottoming with on a 60-year low. My stop market loss order of $3.99 was triggered but not executed until $3.75, resulting in a $360 hit plus commissions. Would of been a couple hundred dollar profit if I had unloaded it on Friday, and could of been worse if the stop order didn’t go through (a real possibility if this wasn’t a paper trade). Ford spiked at the open and I should of took profits at around $2.05 for like $320, but sold at $1.93 for only a $80 profit. I waited trying not to act too early in today’s session, but recently Ford has been sinking/rising when GM does so I should of known it would only get lower. In terms of opening a new position, I took a chance on SRZ at $1.33 based on Muddy’s alert in the chatroom at Investors Live. I think the logic is the stock hit a 52-week low and there should be a bounce. If I had more patience with Muddy’s call last week on DPTR last week, I could of taken a big profit instead of selling it at such a loss on Friday.
My process of flipping a coin, giving me a 50-50 chance in an effort to simulate the limited access to shares on shorts, worked good today, but it meant I couldn’t get into the the fun with shorting RUTH because there was “no shares available” according to the flip. HRZ, embarrassingly, was meant to be a short based on a chat alert, but I put the order in wrong. But then the stock went up and I made a small profit. As you can see, I danced with SRZ earlier in the day as a day trade, and it did get lower all the way to $1.22, but I got out with a 1 cent profit (but got back in long and overnight later as I said above). LVS was a short I got into too late (it dropped from $8.50), and then when it plummeted to $8.13, I got greedy and didn’t take profits, and it spiked back up. VCI was my best trade of the day. First, I identified the play myself using FINVIZ’s screener, looking for stocks that had the greatest percent drop on the day. The chart showed a possible bottoming, and an increase in volume as it headed back up. I followed it with a trailing stop and took profits five cents under the final high of the day at the close.
Long-term Portfolio
This has been ugly. I’ve lost nearly $1K in one week. The idea was to see if a buy and hold strategy would be more lucrative than more active trading. Not in a bull market with long positions. The only thing good was I bought in November, which some say is better than buying in May. I think the stock picks were fine (like GOOG and APPL), but I should of done a better job looking at charts and trying to buy on a dip. Last week, I started out with some penny stocks that did ok and I sold for slight profits, but these were more suited for swing trades. I have about $2k after selling these to pick some other long-term stocks, so I may go with some energy and stem cell research stocks based on priorities of the new administration.
