TIM $12,797.84 (-$11 on the day, up $382.84 on the week)
This was a wild day in the markets and I’m pretty disappointed in myself. Not only did I not finish the day with any gains, but I pissed away my last remaining day trade so I can’t day trade again until next Tuesday (in honor of this ridiculous Pattern Day Trading Rule which didn’t exist the last t
ime I had $12k). Of course, I can still trade if I hold overnight, but I hate holding overnight. I’ve got a lot of frustration to let out–be warned.
Pre-market (before 9:30am), I saw all the solar plays going crazy—a result of FSLR’s tremendous earnings blowout (the stock held onto a $50 gain all day!). All the wannabe FSLRs: STP, SPWR, ESLR, HOKU and JASO were all surging, but ESLR looked to be surging out of sync with the others, as its shares were up nearly 20% on just a few hundred thousand traded while everyone else was just up 10% or so. This is the way I trade—I look for outliers like this and try to determine if their special strength or weakness is deserved. In ESLR’s case, I thought not. Sure, the stock has been a on a tear, but a $2 gap up to $15.67 was too much to not attract sellers and short sellers, so I tried to short 200 shares.
Whoops, hard to borrow. Thinkorswim has near immediate customer service so I opened my handy chat window and got the required borrow within a few minutes. This actually saved me quite a bit because I shorted my 200 shares at $16.13 (50 cents higher), right near the early morning peak. The price went back and forth between $15.80 and $16.20 for 20 or so minutes and I ended up covering at $15.73—a gain of $70, after commissions. I didn’t want to hold much longer because I was scheduled to film a video for AOL at 11am and I knew from experience not to keep a trade like this open while I was gone (turned out to be the right call because the stock surged nearly $1 before settling back around my exit point). Decent trade, low risk, low reward, but I really prefer to short sell these kinds of plays in the afternoon because there’s much less volatility as the overnight news and expectations have already been absorbed into the price.
So, I filmed a sweet clip at AOL HQ and had a great chat about the future of internet video with them. After stopping off for a quick bite , I returned to find many of my favorite stocks getting crushed along with the overall market. JRJC down $5, LULU down $4, SYNA down $5, VMW down $13, ISRG down $25, BIDU down $45!!?!??! Very bearish, but people were probably panicking a little too much. Should I risk it? Hmmm, yes! I knew I was down to my last day trade so my goal was to find a stock to buy to hold overnight. Sure, the solar plays ENER, ESLR, FSLR and the like were holding their gains and could strengthen with any market bounce, but noooooo, I wanted a bounce play.
LULU was out as it had just breached sideways price action (meaning that sideways price would act as resistance on the ay up), BIDU and ISRG were too expensive for TIM, JRJC tanked quickly—who knew what was going there (and they were up nicely yesterday), and SYNA, well, that stock just wasn’t volatile enough for me. I ended up buying 50 shares of VMW at $90.81 as it was down from $125 just a few days ago and $97 just a few hours ago. All I wanted was a bounce of $4-$6/share, shouldn’t be too difficult, right? I’d have the patience to hold!
Yeah, guess what—I have no patience and since the stock showed no signs of bouncing, I began worrying about it gapping down overnight and losing $4-$6/share. Couldn’t risk that so I sold my 50 shares at $89.39 just a few hours into the position, wiping out all my ESLR gains and $10 in commission-related losses. Idiot.
Good news was I cut my losses quickly and was probably right to do so as the stock never bounced like SYNA, LULU, BIDU and ISRG. LULU actually bounced perfectly. Bad news—why was I in this in the first place?!?!?! Trying to impress people who read my website? Trying to claw my way to $25k? Who knew—either way I shouldn’t have been in this kind of position with my tiny account. In reality, there weren’t any spectacular trade setups today (have patience, I swear they exist) so I’m actually kind of glad that I can’t day trade until next week—I need to put aside all the pressure, expectations, naysayers and just focus on trading worthy opportunities, rare as they may be.
Discipline problems as usual, hopefully I get an abnormal amount of hate mail tonight to rub it in, maybe that’ll teach me!
PS Oh yeah CYGT had a nice PR this morning talking what they’re unveiling next week at IAAPA. This paragraph sounds interesting:
“For Internet sales, Cygnus will unveil ceShop(TM) V3, a revolutionary new technology that converts informational websites into immersive, online stores simply by adding a few lines of code. This new concept retains the customer inside the client’s branded website, providing a seamlessly integrated shopping experience.”
Who knows–I’ll report what I see next week. For now, there were some buyers today, but the volume was pathetic so it’s meaningless.
Warning: TIM, Timothy Sykes, and the Easter Bunny have positions in CYGT.
Please note that due to factors including low market capitalization and/or insufficient public float, we consider some of these stocks to be small-cap stocks. You should be aware that such stocks are subject to more risk than stocks of larger companies, including greater volatility, lower liquidity and less publicly available information, and that postings such as this one can have an effect on their stock prices.
