I love when TIMalert subscribers ask me questions like this…my answering these question not only help people better understand my goals, but also shows how I am 100% real as are TIMalert subscriber profits!
Check it out:
Hi Tim,
Thanks for all you do. I’ve been following you for the last year and a half or so and just last week signed up for TimAlerts. I just wanted to make a suggestion. When you alerted this week that you shorted 10,000 shares of Imaging3, Inc. (IMGG) I got the alert and there were shares to short in IB. I put the order in and it sat on the exchange for over a minute (as you know OTC stocks can take awhile). After a minute went by there were no longer any shares left to short and thus I couldn’t enter the trade and I missed out on a great profit.
So my suggestion is that for stocks you’re shorting where you know the shares are limited that you enter a smaller position so your subscribers have more chance to get in. I know that you are mainly trading to teach us and that you make a good profit already from all the subscribers. I understand that you probably want to have some skin in the game because if you don’t it just doesn’t feel the same (that’s why I could never get into paper trading). I also understand that you want to be able to say that you are up X amount of dollars to market your strategy but I think percentages work just as well and if you’re up 20% on a trade it’s the same percent whether you have 100 shares or 1 million shares.
The other alert you sent about shorting Netlist, Inc. (NLST) if you had Sogotrade was very helpful and welcome and shows that you can still make a good trade and make your subscribers happy without even being in it yourself. If you go in with big positions and then your auto-trading accounts also match that then it may get to the point where shares are gone almost immediately for the other 1500 subscribers.
I know you’ll probably say to anticipate the trade and get in before you or that’s it’s just for educational purposes and that we shouldn’t be trading anyways but I just wanted to suggest it since it seems more fair to the paying subscribers. And with buys and easy to borrow stocks it’s a non issue. Either way like I say I really appreciate what you do and I’ve learned a lot. Hopefully we’ll both do great with all the upcoming alerts this year. Have a great weekend.
Patrick
Thank you for the suggestion…I will do no such thing. I do trade for teaching purposes, but as my account has grown from $12k to nearly $100k in 2 years, so has my trading size grown to help show others EXACTLY how I trade at various points during my feat of turning $12,415 into $1.65 million. If I win on a traders, others can learn from what I did right. If I lose on a trade due to my size, others can learn from what I did wrong. No matter what happens, the learning will happen, which is my goal for this entire challenge/blog.
In a near-perfect world there will be ZERO shares left to trade after I short because everyone will have learned from my instructional DVD packages and pas trades so they will have anticipated my trades enough so that the supply of available shares to short will be limited.
In a totally perfect world, I will be unable to short sell my own patterns because I will have taught them so well to so many people, and not just my successes but from my failures too, so that by the time my mistake-riddled trading mind (which has not benefitted from my own teaching as much as others have because it is far easier to teach others than to teach yourself…especially if you are stubborn like me), there will be ZERO shares available for me to short because my students will have grabbed them all ahead of time.
Am I making my point clear?
PS 1/3 of my trades are actually buys too and TIMalert subscribers who don’t like shorting are encouraged to think of my buy-to-cover orders after short sells as potential buy signals…covering NLST at $4.15 turned out to be a pretty good buy!
