One Of The Worst Trading Days Of My Life

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TIM $13,851, Down $766 on the Day, No Positions

If you continually break your own rules and thanks to SEC imprisonment you have limited opportunities, this is what happens. Read on and learn from mistake #2837283828…

Morning Trades:

Bought 400 (Nasdaq: RGEN) on the breakout of previous high $6.90 at the open, nice nice chart, wipe out a few days ago, so I thought 47+ was a given, ideally $7.50 within 2-3 days. But the breakout didn’t hold and I can’t tie up my cash in non-perfect plays so I sold out at $6.85, $50 loss or so, good trade though, both entry and exit, minimal downside, probable upside, next!

As I keep blabbing about, I basically predicted COIN’s gap up, but I ended up losing $600 on it this morning—TIM’s largest lost to date—shorting it at $11.71, covering at $13.02 because the cynical bastard in me wanted it to go down after their ridiculous mention on CNBC. I was soooooo wrong. Covering COIN at $13.02 was painful, but it ended up being a good cover, because it didn’t drop quickly and instead gradually uptrended to $14. Of course the beauty of this chart pattern is that if I didn’t get freaked out, I wouldn’t be down much, since it closed at $12.30 (aka the reason why you don’t have to be a good timer in this game, you just need patience to hold).

The Most Important TIM Lesson of all: Respect the Pump

Never ever never never ever never short into a morning spike—no matter how absurd—because these spikes loveeeeee sucking in early shorts, creating short squeezes (you hear me Kevin Kelly!), so while you might be right (all these companies are crap) and profit $1-2/share, you also risk big losses so the risk reward ratio just isn’t there. The key to successful shorting is waiting until the momentum dies, exemplified by the afternoon fade! You hear me you freaken moron—get that through your big fat stupid close to a millionaire but not a millionaire because you’re an undisciplined little punk head!

Afternoon Trades:

Speaking of afternoon fades, SEED’s afternoon action exemplifies the perfect afternoon fade.

The ideal entry would have been when it went negative for the day at $11, but since I was too busy watching COIN, I missed that and only saw it around $10.50. Thinking there wasn’t much downside on SEED, I decided to give COIN another shot. Even though it was still up big on the day, I saw it tanking fast on fading volume, not quite an afternoon fade, but I thought I could make back the $600 it took from me this morning.

TIM Lesson: Never enter a trade “to get back to even” — especially when the stock hasn’t cracked support, it’s still up on the day and you’ve got a bunch of meetings that will take you away from the screen the next day (amazingly I ignored all these facts in executing the trade).

Nope, I didn’t make back my money, I lost another $170ish by shorting 400 shares at $12.44, playing it safe by covering at $12.85 (it actually spiked to $13.30 while I was holding it). Horrible entry, this loss serves me right. Ideally, COIN will spike at the open, giving me another shot at shorting (complicated by my meetings), but it also might not—low probability setup right now either way.

What a mess. SEED was the right pattern, but I went for the lower odds win in COIN because it could’ve tanked $1-$2 within a few minutes, but struck out swinging. See the similarity between me shorting into a spike and me hoping for a spike down? Both are wrong. Gradual wins the day, whether you’re long or short.

Here’s a funny new website that wants to clean up market manipulation—c’mon, let the kids play! (aka you can never stop market manipulation, there will always be new players, schemes, investments, why not focusing on profiting from it instead of bashing it?)

Cool video with some crazy globalization facts I bet you didn’t know.

Maker of the $2,500 Car is a NYSE stock that’s $3 off its highs and has been basing for 2 years. (NYSE: TTM) Put it on your watchlist, buy it whenever it breaks out (but not before); truly great story stock

Yet another great Festival of Stocks.

2 Friday bottomers, VPRT and CNQR were the some of the only downers on my watchlist today, aka forget about trying to pick bottoms!

GRO—low probability chart pattern either long or short.

Now you can Twitter any questions/comments to TIMhelp and obviously you can follow TIM on twitter too!

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