Robert Weinstein Trading Blog

Lots of stops today

I just could not get a handle on UPL, sold at the bottom of the first move down only to buy it back up as it moved to the top where I completed the buying which just happened to be the top of the move. This went back and forth several times which resulted in losses racking up. The other trades today worked out ok less FCX.

UPL started out like I said as a short and then it turned into a long and then a short and back and forth. I did end up getting some of it back on the last large leg up. To top it off I even shorted near the EOD and was able to get a very small amount from that. While the total is pretty large it was 200 and 300 at a time. This stock simply had my number today and There was not much I could do about it. I did almost trade USO at one point as that was oversold as well but stayed with UPL. I would have guessed that they would have stayed closer together but it took until the end of day for the differences to merge. Someone with experience with pair trading might have done well with that trade. I don’t know enough so I didn’t consider it past the thought that it might have been a good trade. I will say for as bad as UPL was I did take stop losses while trading through the trade. This allowed me to stay with the trade while becoming smaller and smaller as it went against me. While this method normally ends as a loss it also keeps the trade from getting really nasty as well. – 1128

APD was was oversold I thought in light of the company breaking out the checkbook to buy other companies. Just a small size trade at the open of 100 shares that just about netted a dollar each share. + 98

ARG was overbought even in premarket. with an offer to buy of 60 and a hope of getting more when APD was getting hammered for its offer seemed like a good risk to reward. I shorted and it started to go my way and came back and I took the stop. It did end up falling for much of the day but at the time I put on a 100 share trade and kept a tight stop loss. when it when in the green I moved the stop to just better than green and sure enough it was hit before falling further. + 9

FCX was an ok trade that I made a few dollars in but went to the cookie jar to many times. I had a small gain but closed out half of the short in after hours for a loss which took the gain. I still have my bid in and perhaps it will get hit. If not I am ok holding what amounts to a very small gold short over the weekend. -2

LINE oversold long. + 64

MDVN overbought short. new method of qualifying that I need to come up with an official name for. For now I will call it MW signal. Its still new so I kept the shares light. Does show a lot of promise in backtesting. Its not a new signal in concept but new in my ability to scan for it. I expect to be making several of these trades per week + 102

TM puts. Still short the Feb 65 puts but I did put a bid in at .25 thinking it might get hit. I sold them for .76 so I thought for one day that would be worth walking away. The LOD was .25 but surprise surpise with IB my bid was not hit. I don’t have a a factual basis for this but it sure feels like its rare to get hit first even when first to enter at a price point. I understand there are multiple venues of the marketplacebut since IB generally puts limit orders on CBOE from my experience which also happens to have much higher change of order fees it would seem that at least I would be getting hit more in relation to my timing of order entry. Looks like the options will be live until next week in which I would expect to close them out by the end of next week. The IV does not appear to have changed much although the price of TM sure did move nicely today. Looks like next time I better do a better job of calculating the relative IV for the move I expect. I think the biggest problem was waiting as long as I did to selll them. In the AM the IV was much higher as the stock was hitting new lows below the previous days low. The problem with that is like everyone else I don’t really know when it will stop so I have to wait until near the close to calculate the expected result on the following day. It appears everyone else did too……

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