Wow.
If this isn’t a top, then I underestimate the power of the PPT:



Another day like this and I’ll be headed to the bank to take out all of my money in cash. Time to get the gold bars out of the safety deposit box (although gold got killed today too).
Maybe it’s a good time to buy the dips? I don’t know. Anything’s possible, but it is my guess that there will be more pain before it will be a good time to buy.
Jon pointed me to the historical data on yahoo finance comparing today to the Friday before Black Monday in 1987.
The volume today was unreal - a new record for the QQQQ with over 300 million shares traded. Also for the DIA with over 30 million. The SPY also set a record with over 250 million shares traded today.

What a day for the short orders to be screwing up! Ugh! At least a few went through. It’s still rejecting a lot of our short orders and we don’t know why. We put in the function to convert the number error that we were seeing in the log to a text message and all it displayed was “Unknown error.” That doesn’t help much.
What I didn’t realize is that when these trades weren’t going through, the ATS thinks they went through and were stopped out. So, it ended up “striking out” and closing down for the day early, because it thought it was getting stopped out of all of these trades. Unfortunately for us, these missed trades would have gone on to nice profits. And who knows what else the damn thing would’ve shorted later on in the day, had it not quit.
Tonight I have to at least fix it so that it doesn’t think unopened orders are stopped out.
My goal is to get the damn thing fixed by March 1st, so that we can have a full month of trading without problems. I’m eager to get real trade data to look over, so that I can see what parts of the system to tweak.

Just got back from the gym to see the Nasdaq down 78 points!
Ouch!
Had my best trade of the year today with a short of AKAM - I’ll post it later.

The independent Postal Regulatory Commission recommended a ‘forever’ stamp for the US Postal Service today.

For example, if the 41-cent rate takes effect, forever stamps would sell for 41 cents. If rates later climbed to 45 cents or more, the price of the forever stamp would also go up at the counter or machine, but those purchased before the change would still be valid to mail a letter.

It’s about time, this should make things easier. If they had this available in 1883 and you loaded up on the 2 cent forever stamps, you could mail each of your letters today with the stamps that only cost 2 cents. However, 2 cents in 1883 has the same purchasing power as 42 cents today, which is exactly what the post office is seeking for the 2007 rate.
I was thinking of loading up on forever stamps and then selling them in ten years for a profit, but I guess it wouldn’t be a very profitable business.
It’s illegal now, but I wonder if anyone made any money melting coins. I haven’t checked the worth of the metal in a nickel lately, but in December you could make 2 cents profit on each nickel - which is a 40% profit! Take $50,000, turn it into a million nickels and then melt it down to a block of metal and you could sell it for $70,000 - a $20,000 profit. Then you take the $20,000 profit in nickels and compound it as fast as you can melt the coins.
If I had only converted all of my money to nickels a couple years ago…

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 that I missed today, FDX:

If you shorted FDX when it broke below its 10:30 candle at $118.60 with a stop above it at $118.91, you would only risk 31 cents. Waiting to cover until the end of the day would have given you about 155 cents for every share you were short, or 5 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

– 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

– Click here for today’s full list –

Today the ATS only made one short trade before it crashed. It tried to short two other stocks, but they were both rejected. I’m pretty sure the first one was rejected because there weren’t enough shares available to short. But I am not sure why the other one didn’t go through. Right now the log only shows a number for the reason it was rejected, but we think there’s a function to display the text - so we’ll try to put that in for tomorrow.
After the last trade was rejected, I tried to enter it in manually and the damn thing wigged out and crashed. That happened once before when I tried to enter a trade manually. So we have to work on that, too.
Overall, the things that need to be fixed are:

1) Some short orders are being rejected for unknown reasons
2) The ATS can’t enter orders for less than 100 shares
3) Stop orders are net cancelling all other open orders for the same position

It works pretty well now, but if we can fix the above problems it will run exactly as we want it to.

“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

– 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

– Click here for today’s full list –