End of week 3

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Good Friday is here, and this week ended early. Oh well. Another week, another lesson. Let’s get some summary first:

I closed OVTI for +$1.13, not bad, but could be better, in fact, I should’ve closed it when it hit $21. I re-entered and exited REE for a -$.20 loss. (I’ll get to this later) Jumped on MAGS midway and exited before going back to red for a tiny gain. Prepped and entered KMX on higher earning expect, and I’m right, only to get bombed by the accounting revise and exited -$1. Opened a tiny TVIX position, mostly for hedging use(a bit nonsense?), and – guess what – I bought 2 contract of Jan’13 5 Call on NOK to try to repair the lackluster. The other half of repair, 4 contract of Jan’13 6 Call, is yet to find a buyer and I’ll try do it next week.

Now the lesson part: Still putting in orders in a fast pace. But I think I have started to cut back. However, another problem showed up: impulsive trading. This could be very very dangerous. In this week’s trades, TVIX is def an impulsive buy. MAGS is also an impulsive buy, and a stupid add-on almost broke it. This should never happen. I’ll try my best to make sure it will never happen. Also, Should’ve jumped on RNDY? It doesn’t seem to dip, so I never really had a chance, but if the “Cramer effect” goes on, I may jump in anyways.

The plan next week: Just put in an order for CYBI, fundamental looks good, technical looks promising, it’s def worth speculating a bit. Earning season is here, and got quite some speculation target. WFC/INTC might be a good one if technical goes better. Also I should jump on RNDY on open?

Mark this day

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I think Monday is the first day that I DID NOT PUT IN A SINGLE ORDER. This is important. Really need to turn down the trade count. Sure, IB is the cheapest in terms of commission, but for beginner like me, more trades = more mistakes. And I believe in it.

So…back to today’s market. Surging! AAPL is leading the way and OVTI finally broke out. Probably it’s time to rotate and pocket the profit of OVTI. I still have faith in AAPL but to be honest, I don’t know if I can hold much longer. It’s a great stock numbers-wise, but stock market is NOT always numbers. Also, WTH is going on with EGAS after hour? It just dropped almost a full dollar like that. I know it’s a tiny-cap stock with like 10K share daily volume, but a 8% drop? Better give an explanation. That one move basically ruined my otherwise perfect day.

After finishing up with OVTI, I think it’s about time to turn to some retail/consumer guys. RNDY, thanks to Jim Cramer, surged pretty good for the last two sessions, and it looks good on paper at least. Will try buy dip and tight stop it. Another thought is IMAX. We all know how good it is, but the reason to buy the STOCK, not a MOVIE TICKET, is that their revenue rising. And that revenue comes from International, which means there is SPACE.

Admittedly, both plays are sort of speculative, but we’ll see.

A lesson a day, keep the loss away

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…or not, you never know. but it’s always good to learn something everyday.

I was looking at my activity statement from broker, and I found this astonishing truth: ALL BUT ONE, and by that I mean 4 out of 5 of my short-term position ended up a realized loss. AAPL and OVTI has been saving my ass. And I have held them since day 1(translation, Mar 19th). Something is wrong. For sure. For now, I think I’m just over-hyped about stock and trading, and over-react on almost anything. That results in selling too early. That results on little if any homework before putting orders in. That is a problem. I need discipline, I need education, I need information. I’ll try my best to NOT place an order without doing the work. This must happen or wipeout is just a matter of time.

All right, back to daily log part. I started to use trailing stop to, duh, stop loss and/or protect profit. And I achieved both today. I set WDC trailing stop limit sell at 42.2 and for whatever reason it filled at 42.6. That was unexpected, and that’s how profit is protected(I’m in the green the whole way, and this is the ONLY profiting short term position I had). For REE things are a bit rough though. trailing stop saved me. Also I opened a NOK position. That $99 for top-tier smartphone could be attractive, and they will start selling another top-tier phone in China, the biggest growing market. I’m not 100% sure about their decision to team up with China Telecom though, Unicom would be a much better choice IMO. We’ll see.

For tomorrow(maybe I should call it today?) I’m thinking about getting in on EGAS. Mini-cap company, solid P/E, monthly dividend(aka helps with cash), and if I got this right, they should benefit from the natural gas meltdown, which, relating recent energy policies, could open a good market for EGAS. Looking for position around 10-day SMA or 11.40ish. If ER on Friday fails then cut it, if beats then add on around same price if possible.

Plugin for stock quotes

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After some dig I think this could be helpful. I want a plugin that gives all tickers in posts a hover image, and this seems to be working fine:

http://andy.hillhome.org/blog/code/sqtt/

It uses Yahoo data, so pretty reliable. The only downside though, is that you have to manually enter a mapping between company name and ticker, and for a homegamer (Booya) like me, I only use tickers. That means I have to map ticker to ticker…Maybe when I get some time during weekend I can tinker it a bit and include it into the editor so I can use some kind of hashtag like [quote#BBY] to get ticker for bestbuy. I’m no programmer or web guru or anything close to that, I’ll just tinker around if I have time…

Stock & gamble, I don’t really like what I did

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Closed BBY this morning in a manual-trailing-stop fashion…Problem is, I accidentally sold 100 share when I only have 30…which means I shorted 70 shares…which I thought I would never do. So I closed it immediately. Problem 2 is, this would be considered a day trade…I don’t know if I got lucky or unlucky, cause I could have made all the margin cost back and some more given how BBY went today. Anyways. Another thing is that I opened a long position on REE. Guess I was hyped into this because the BBY fiasco, and I went in at a relatively high price of the day. As of now I’m under water a bit. I just got bitten by AVL days before in almost the exact situation. I should have learnt from it. For now, stock market is really gamble-ish for me recently, with all kinds of uninformed decision and trades. I don’t like it and I better be working on this or the real trouble will begin sooner than later.

Overall, still a plus day, which is great consider DOW and S&P went down. AAPL has been kind to me so far, though I went in at a very high point. OVTI is just slowly swinging, I don’t know when should I close it yet, maybe around their next ER? WDC is doing fine for most of the day then dropped with the index. I have put on a trailing stop so guess I’m done with it if it dips. Then there’s REE. Just like AVL, low priced,(I’m not saying it’s undervalued), and had a mad rush this morning which dragged me in, let’s hope I don’t get bitten again like AVL.

If I got cash freed up tomorrow I may consider getting in DANG or RENN or JNPR when/if they dip.

First post

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Let’s start with stock.

Good run today but a really bad choice. Went in for $BBY at almost daily high, and you know the rest. Other positions went well though, just like the market. YTD(or should I say weekly, since I just started last week) is 1.3%, which I don’t know if it means anything.

I think I’m still in the “honeymoon period” with stock. I don’t know when that ends, but we’ll see. Everything is new so I got a long way to go.