Robert Weinstein Trading Blog

Took another look

Last night before going home I asked myself the all important question when things are not going well. What changed from last year at this time to this year? Was the market different or was I different. I came up with that I am different and the markets are the same in terms of offering oppertunities in the way I prefer to trade. I thought perhaps I have “curve fitted” my main signal to the point where I am not getting any more signals. The major changes took place after I was given some advise to not fade overboughts and to just enter in fully at a better point. I tried to do that and spent a lot of time looking at the charts and actually came up with some very good improvements. So good in fact that its pretty common lately when I do get a signal to hit the very top. The numbers of trades that really move against me fell by a very large percentage. Sounds all good but there was two problems. Once in a while (although much less so) they still run against me so I can’t “drop the hammer” anyway and the second more important thing is I went to having one or more signals on any given day last year at this time and I have fallen to less than two per week (perhaps less than one per week). So while the improvements did help my trades that I did get my overall gains went down because it was better to take a few large hits once in a while (like a weeks worth of gains every month or more) then to almost never take a hit and lose out of all the good trades.

So I stayed up very late last night working on doing a comparison of preveous versions of my main overbought signal and I found that I wanted to take the best of both and adjust it once again in a major way. I started it last night and will be working on it for the next couple of weeks. In the mean time I am running as best I can both signals on my scanner. I think if I go back to my trading like summer of 09 minus the scalping that was a net large loser I will be on the right track for the rest of the year. Especially after the adjustments that keep me from the worst of the worst.

With all that I didn’t get any overbought signals that I traded. I did get one fully qualified but I didn’t have the alarm setup correctly and when it went off in premarket due to it signaling yesterday it didn’t automatically reset. I wish that was the default for TS instead of having to remember to change the setting.

Otherwise today was a pretty good day.

NETL started out the day with a gap up. I could have traded it better but did “B” work. An “A” would have been much better but I handled the exit well so I am ok with it. Best trade of the day in terms of gains. + 489

LXK was perhaps the strangest and it became strange as I wrote this. In after hours trading the ask fell by about 15 cents (was almost totally dead in activity) and did so in very large size and at multiple levels. I had a bid to cover at 32.01 or so and the ask came down to 32.12 and I thought I would take the 200 shares off the table and be flat overnight. I do think the odds favor it falling further but it was a quick 20 cent gain and if it goes higher at the open I can fade that. I moved my bid up to the ask and sure enough nothing happened. I hate when an offer is “fake” or IB is making errors. There was another offer at the next tic and I moved my bid to that and I was filled at the second ask. I traded LXK several times today and at one point I was short and about to bail on it and then it gave me an overbought unqualified signal and so I traded around the basis and ended up making a little bit on it when otherwise I would have taken a hit of maybe $300. As it was I did get stopped out of some and some my gain was not very large + 106

AMED WW long at support and it fell through so I took a stop. I wanted to take a different stop but my stop loss didn’t fire with IB. Really sucks because it then fell much further while I was trying to manually stop out. Really poor on the software of IB. As I worked to get stopped out AMED moved back into my favor so the end result was my stop loss was not as bad as it wouldhave otherwise been but I would rather have software that did what it is supposed to do instead of playing the luck game. Had I not been watching it I could really have been hurt as it feel much further before it did finally come back. – 8

APKT was a market maker dream stock today. Back and forth right at the same price for much of the day and slow moves for the most part when it did move. I did ok considering I was short but I traded a lot of shares (on purpose) to get there. Otherwise it never retraced to make anything on the gap up but I didn’t lose any either. I came back at it later in the day and added a small amount to the gain. + 126

CSCO Afterhours trade long with the trend after earnings came out. small 200 shares for a quick grab. + 46

SWK was the best looking trade of the day. I shorted it just before it fell off the cliff around 1030AM CST. I caught a large amount of the move for the few shares that I did have in the trade. I am still not comfortable putting any size on these types of trades and keeping the size on for the bulk of the move. That is an area I could work on. I did manage to cover some near the bottom of the move and stopped out correctly on the remainder. + 245

TM was a fade of the Fed news. GS downgraded it shortly after but it didn’t get beat up to bad from that but enough for me to stop out. I took another small whack at it when sure enough the feds backpeddled their statements (that wasn’t hard to see coming). I was just trading 100 shares at a time and one one a scalp + 45

ZAGG was a breakout long cheap lotto ticket. Never went far and when it retraced I stopped out just above even + 4

Now flat thanks to the strange LXK offer

+ 1055