As you can see from the chart of my cumulative R, most of this month was flat and choppy:

Just after my 100th trade of the month, I reached a low point. Since August I have been trying to pull myself out of a slump and to have a break down like this towards the end of November was very frustrating and difficult. I thought a lot about my trading that evening and decided to trade first off of the daily charts and second off of the intraday charts. Previous to this I was concerned mostly with the intraday charts.
As you can see I made many trades this month. Waiting only for the best setups on the daily charts should help me to trade less.
Even though the month was only slightly better than flat, I was finally able to break over the 100R mark since June:

So although I am not out of my slump yet, I am optimistic that I will be soon. The chart looks good.
I feel comfortable with the new change to my trading. It isn’t that different. I still will enter many dummy trades. The only difference is that I will only enter dummy trades on stocks on my watchlist - stocks that have a nice daily setup.
Even though it is very similar to the way I traded before, it is slightly different and I am a little nervous about the change and uncertain about the results. They look good so far, but it has only been a couple of weeks.

“It is one of the great paradoxes of the stock market that what seems too high usually goes higher and what seems too low usually goes lower.” - William O’Neil

Symbol	Price	Volume	Avg. Volume	% Vol. Increase
VRA	0.21	2662000	569320	%367.57
SFLK	0.111	714036	914335	%-21.90
WLV	1.13	194600	444630	%-56.23
BWTR	7	177136	0	%N/A
MDWV	0.59	119096	29336	%305.97

– Click here for today’s full list –

“It is one of the great paradoxes of the stock market that what seems too high usually goes higher and what seems too low usually goes lower.” - William O’Neil

Symbol	Price	Volume	Avg. Volume	% Vol. Increase	High Alpha
XOM	76.81	27265900	20461500	%33.25
XLE	60.51	26096000	24156400	%8.02
VCLK	24.87	16494143	2106830	%682.88
CVX	72.32	11934600	8926930	%33.69
NVDA	36.99	9216685	10285600	%-10.39

– Click here for today’s full list –

Dear diary,
Today was another crappy frustrating POS lame-ass day. I never do well on the last day of the month - it always seems boring and choppy. Nothing really moved on my watchlist, but when I looked at the scanner at the end of the day, there seemed to be a lot dummy-trade opportunities that I missed.
I forgot about my tea this morning and accidentally steeped it for two hours. It was very strong, bitter and non-warm by the time I drank the first cup. The second cup was spilled on the desk after I hit the desk with my fist when I was stopped out of a short on AEOS.
I’ll post a review of the month later.

Since day trading is a lot about recognizing the patterns in charts, I have decided to post a chart every day that would have resulted in a profitable dummy trade. I will post these in the dummy-a-day category which you can simply click to review for practice. The chart will be displayed as it looked when the trade should have been executed, and when you move your mouse over the image, it will show how the trade would have resulted.
Here is one I missed from today, SPF:

If you bought SPF when it broke above the 11:30 candle at $24.66 with a stop below it at $24.53, you would only risk 13 cents. Holding until the end of the day would have given you about 103 cents for every share you owned, or nearly 8 times your risk.

Good morning, my name is Ugly, and I am a loser. I have it in me to do serious financial damage to my account.

Dear Diary,
Last day of the month - let’s finish it off nicely.
Based on yesterday’s trading, the following stocks are worth noting:

PXP	Basic Materials	Independent Oil & Gas
ATI	Basic Materials	Industrial Metals & Minerals
XOM	Basic Materials	Major Integrated Oil & Gas
WNR	Basic Materials	Oil & Gas Refining & Marketing
DVAX	Healthcare	Drug Manufacturers - Other
GHDX	Healthcare	Medical Laboratories & Research
SIGM	Technology	Semiconductor Equipment & Materials
QI	Technology	Semiconductor- Memory Chips
MIR	Utilities	Diversified Utilities

Support uglychart.com by becoming a sponsor!

Since day trading is a lot about recognizing the patterns in charts, I have decided to post a chart every day that would have resulted in a profitable dummy trade. I will post these in the dummy-a-day category which you can simply click to review for practice. The chart will be displayed as it looked when the trade should have been executed, and when you move your mouse over the image, it will show how the trade would have resulted.
Here is one I missed from today, BTJ:

If you bought BTJ when it broke above the 1:00 candle at $19.01 with a stop below it at $18.94, you would only risk 7 cents. Holding until the end of the day would have given you about 92 cents for every share you owned, or over 13 times your risk.

“It is one of the great paradoxes of the stock market that what seems too high usually goes higher and what seems too low usually goes lower.” - William O’Neil

Symbol	Price	Volume	Avg. Volume	% Vol. Increase
TOPT	5.04	2669738	269166	%891.85
VRA	0.23	2480300	519162	%377.75
SFLK	0.12	1016289	907816	%11.94
MZ	0.69	378300	139376	%171.42
MDWV	0.62	165309	31118	%431.23

– Click here for today’s full list –

“It is one of the great paradoxes of the stock market that what seems too high usually goes higher and what seems too low usually goes lower.” - William O’Neil

Symbol	Price	Volume	Avg. Volume	% Vol. Increase	High Alpha
XLE	60.05	28078300	24120800	%16.40
XOM	76.03	24850400	20360600	%22.05
DVAX	9.79	19611698	1866280	%950.84
CVX	71.05	10237600	8876700	%15.33
PD	122.53	8652800	6859810	%26.13

– Click here for today’s full list –

Today was really frustrating for the following reasons:
1) The market was kind of choppy
2) I traded too much, trying to force things
3) I missed a lot of good moves that were on my watch list
4) The move that I got was with a small position because I only got a partial fill on a limit order
5) I mistyped an order and screwed myself

The best way to make sure I don’t have more frustrating days in the future is to:
1) Meditate every morning (I haven’t been doing it lately)
2) Don’t try to force things - stop at 1pm, trade only the BEST setups.
3) Prepare myself better the night/morning before
4) Try to use more market orders or at least wider limit orders, so I don’t screw myself on partial fills
5) Be careful entering orders

NTRI moves fast and I got screwed this morning. At around 10:10, I had a nice profitable position in NTRI. Within a couple of minutes, I had a big loser. I even had an order to sell partial position if it went down to breakeven, but I had entered the order wrong, putting the number of shares for the price and the price for the number of shares. I didn’t notice after I entered the order that it immediately became inactive because of the bogus numbers. So I had to quickly manually enter the order, much below (about 1R below) the price I wanted. Oops.

Just after 10:45 I noticed ARO breaking out so I put in a limit order and only got 20% of the fill. It then ran up quickly for the next hour.


ATI and VPHM went nuts - both were on my watchlist.
But at least I didn’t lose money.