Wednesday, July 22, 2009

July 22 trades

Keeping the post brief. I also had a couple of losers and some other trades too apart from the ones posted below.


Tried to use TraderAM's style of trading.  5th candle saw some retracement and was off the ORL and 5 EMA. Short on the break and covered for a $1 profit.

Kind of a double top with momentum divergence on oscillators. Very choppy action. Covered at ORH and previous support - $95.40

PDL acting as resistance. Short on the break of 2nd bar low and covered at ORL.

5 comments:

Tajir said...

First I wanted to thank you for daily charts and analysis you post on your blog. I have learnt a lot from you, Jamie, Jim, TraderAM, Tyler, Trader-X, Tom C., Mike and the list goes on. I understand that it is not an easy task to post charts daily and sometimes get a negative feedback. I must also tell you that it has been a great learning opportunity for startups like myself to learn from all of you experienced traders.

You seem to find great opportunities daily and I wanted to ask a question regarding your watchlist, similar to what I asked Tyler few weeks back, that is, how do you get your daily candidates. Is it gap plays, premarket plays, fixed watchlist via afterhours screens etc. I will appreciate if you can give us a brief idea of how your daily prep goes and once you have identified potential candidates, how you keep a watch on them for low risk entries (alerts, several pages of charts etc.) as the day progresses.

I seem to struggle with finding candidates and in case I find few good ones (usually gap lists), I miss low risk entry because the chart was not up on my screen at that moment.

Thanks

Day Tradr said...

Hello Tajir,

Glad you found the blog useful. First of all, I want to clarify that I am not a successful trader. I am just learning how to day trade. I do not post all my trades on the blog, esp. the losers and often mention this in the posts.

I have a fixed watch list (around 40) and most of my trades come from them. I do make addition& deletion to the list but not very often. I mostly have 2 stocks from energy, banks, broker, ag-chem, biotech; 1 from casino, education, transport, few chinese stocks etc.

I also add some pre-market movers/scan candidates to my temporary watch list which is basically intraday watch list and I do not save that list.

I use TradeStation as my broker and use their charting platform. They have a scanner in which I may run 4 scans that I learnt from TraderAM - gap up, gap down, fall thru. PDL, rise thru. PDH. All these scans are scheduled to run at 9.46 am. The scanner window is minimized and I do not have to do anything. I may or may not go through the scan candidates but they are ready just in case if I want. For example today, I went thru. the scanned candidates and found that the gap up candidate list was a bit huge for me. I went thru a few ones and then moved over to fall thru. candidates and found GENZ which I added to my temporary watch list because I liked the first weak bar closing below R2 along with a few others.

I like trading inside bar setups. TradeStation has a radar screen where it shows if a stock has formed an inside bar which makes me easier to find the setup. I described how the radar screen works in the comment section of this post: http://daytradr.blogspot.com/2009/04/gs-cup-handle.html?showComment=1239236160000

This makes my work a lot easier esp. for a slow person like me. Since I use mostly 15 min. charts for the trades, it gives me time to go thru. the list. I have the support-resistance marked on the chart before the day opens.

My daily prep. is simple. Start my day around 8:45-9.00 am EST: Go thru the news. on google finance, draw support-resistance lines on the charts, see daily charts (this is usually do the previous night. If I missed it, I do the following morning), see how the stocks are faring in pre-market along with SPY and QQQQ. This gives a general idea if the stocks on my regular WL will gap up/down or open within the PDR. If it appears that it will be a range bound day, I like to use scan candidates if I can find one.

10 mins. after the open, sort my WL on % change and focus on outliers. If I see strong movement in a particular stock, I add it to my temporary WL so that I can focus on it more. For example, if you see my yesterday post, I liked the strong bar in FSLR and weak bar in FDX. So I added them to my temporary WL. Also, if there are any inside bar on any of the candidates, radar screen will alert me and I can check if there is any setup I like. If I don't like find any setup on those, I move on to the others. In spite of this, I miss a lot of good setups - like WYNN today.

That's pretty much how I trade. My answer is not very organized. So if you have questions or if I'm not clear in any part, do let me know. Also, if you want me to post my regular WL or scan criteria, let me know.

Thanks,
Day Tradr

Tajir said...

Daytradr,

Thankyou for a detailed response. It is very helpful. You mentioned that you have around 40 stocks on your watchlist, was there any criteria used to pick them up apart from sector diversification as you mentioned. Also, gap up/gap down filter, I assume are above/below PDH/PDL.



Thanks again.

Day Tradr said...

Liquidity - to get in and out quickly, should have a nice average true range, should not have wide spreads (I however have BIDU and ISRG on my WL), mostly within $20-$100 range (again have some exceptations like AAPL, BIDU, ISRG)

Tajir said...

Thanks for your response.