Ups and Downs

 Hey all,

Wildly enough, it's been a bit of a tough week.  To be honest, I am surprised it is Wednesday.

Monday was interesting.  I was watching a ticker OCGN.  Pre-market, that bad boy was nothing really too special in my opinion, but right before open it hit VWAP and hung out there for a few min and then started to rise.  You can see this in the 5 min chart below.  But the calls in the chat room were talking about it going either way.  Basically, the play was to wait a few minutes to see what it was going to do and trade either an up or down strategy based on the direction it moved.  As you can see from the chart, it moved up, folks played it long, then short, then long again, and made a killing...  Me, I missed it because I wasn't sure yet. So I decided to paper trade that ticker.  Knowing what it was going to do, I would go to paper money, and trade on a 20 min delay.  I could work on my entries and exits on a moving stock. Practice without losing real hard-earned income. 

This is where I found that Think or Swim seems to have a bug.  I was watching the ticker and Active Trader (AT) it 20 min delay, but when I went to purchase, it was purchasing at actual real non delayed prices. When I tried to enter at 8 dollars before the market opened, I actually purchased at 9.47.  I still was able to make "money" but it was less than I thought and caused me some confusion.

It turns out that, and this should have been apparent to me, that getting in and out and being comfortable is important when working with a high moving ticker.  After practice on Monday, I now feel way more confident in how to enter and exit.  Side note, this might be embarrassing to me years down the road, but to get in quicker it is best to select a price on AT where people are asking.  Helps.

Tuesday was one that tested me for sure.  My goodness... Here is how it went.  I was watching pre-market, and it was a wild one, It had a big swing before open, but I thought I will wait for the morning move, see what it does (I thought it would go down and it did) and. I would buy low and ride it back up.  Why did I think this you might wonder? That morning they had an earnings call where they showed better than expected earnings and revenue.  My thought was the dip before open was a pre-market selloff and then I expected it to dip like it did the day before at open. (That part may have been foolish).

I watched it drop and then I bought it, and of course, I bought it too early. It went up a little but then decided to drop ultimately down quite a bit.  I had only wanted to risk a certain amount and when it got to that point, I had a decision to make. 

This is where I was actually happy with myself yesterday.  It hit my risk and bounced around and I thought to myself in real-time, "OK, depending on what this next candle does is how I will react".  If the candle continued to push down, I was going to cut my losses.  If it went up I was going to hold as it was above my risk point.  (I also think I was looking at risk a bit wrong here as I learned later, but you can't live in the past... I did the best I could with the amount of info I had at the time.)  I sat on that thing ALL THE WAY TO CLOSE.  Just after the close, I decided to sell-off.  The volume was low but it was moving up a bit.  I was able to sell for a very small profit, but green is green.  Way better than my risk point of course.  I found out later that this is a point the IU group talks about as far as exhaustion.  I was physically tired after all that.  Of course, I will get used to the action, but there is nothing like having real money on the line to really feel that emotion. 

Another point of emphasis that I learned.  When I placed my after-hours order, I had it in and orders filled above me but not mine. I thought how could that be? Fun fact, I had to edit my order to EXT instead to get the thing filled.  

Today: :(

Today was not as much fun.  I was convinced in my mind that CRSR (the ticker from yesterday) was going to go up.  I was/am expecting it to go up to about $48.  

Welcome to the SAME MISTAKE I MADE LAST WEEK!  I watched it open, It started to go up, dropped to VWAP, went back up to a new high, and just before that I bought.  As you can see, things went south quickly.  I decided to exit and look for the bottom and rebuy to recover.  The only thing is I was chasing the bottom and I missed it every time.  

What I am learning is that I am showing a ton of rookie mistakes and I really need to get back into the training material from IU and really work to understand what I am doing.  I didn't lose real money, but I was confident it was going up and it really didn't.  It really didn't. I could have recovered my money and then some if I would have been able to buy at the bottom and sell when it went above VWAP, but I missed it. 

Something else also happened today.  Right after I bought this, SPY decided to take a 4 dollar dip.  Bad timing on my part I suppose.  I plan to watch tomorrow to see what's up, but I have a feeling I need to break from it.  Set a price alert or something and not look at it so much. 

Thank you for reading if you made it this far!

TNTrader