AMD, ZOMBIE MODE: ON

AMD

Cute... mindless zombie mode: ON

.. I knew I shoulda had a trailing hard stop on today before I went to sleep.  I felt like this move is unsustainable combined with the moves from 2wks back and I might as well take profits while it's high.  I actually woke up at opening bell, saw NVDA tanking and new it was gonna drag AMD down today like it always do since it's a major player of its sector.  I went back to sleep knowing even if it tanked, the swing trade for a multi-month hold was still intact--but later I realized I could've closed out the position and rebought once NVDA/AMD recovered... woke up a bit later and AMD dropped 60cents to $15 confirming the trend change.. my mental stop for the swing was at 14.40ish so i went back to sleep like an idiot--logged in later and it's around 14.40ish and I started to feel scared that it might tank even more on me since NVDA is still a few dollars from where I feel like it can still drop to.  I wanted to just bail out right there but before I put the order, I made a decision to wake up and fully reassess the day trade..

Logged in to my laptop, saw that it's due for a small bounce.  Saved myself about 20 cents by waiting to sell into the bounce.

Now that i'm awake, I should've captured more gains when it broke to a new high just like I did yesterday or AT LEAST DOWNSIZED my position when it was at 15$ when I woke up with the intent to re-buy once NVDA/AMD started to recover...

I disappointingly closed out the rest of my position for the moment.  The shitty part right now is that I might've sold near bottom at AMD's support, but the risk is that NVDA keeps tanking the rest of the day and drag AMD below the 14.40support. AMD is still lookin' good long for the next few months but I don't like sitting through events and rather just trade the price action after the event.  I'll sit on the sidelines on AMD for now until I see a good entry and I'd like for NVDA to re-test support at the 90-95$ level for a possible buy again to re-test 52wk high.  Might be another 2-4wks till it happens though, hopefully well before the 1Q earnings release.

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Left close to 1$/share in unrealized gains on the table due to mostly not being fully awake to assess the position but lessons learned.  Today was a 400$ lesson that reminded me that zombie trading is still alive and well in me and that I need to come up with better measures against it. Fall seven times, get up eight..

 In the future, I will also just take a loss instead of swinging a day trade that went against me.  However, micromanaging a swing trade based on big movements on the daily chart looks to be beneficial but can get confusing since i'm mixing plans for that one stock and that would defeat the main advantage of swing trading which is not having to babysit the position during the day.

One good thing I can take away today is that a personal short strategy i've come up with showed itself in NVDA at $103.5.  I've been lazy this month of vacation however and I haven't kept track of the data but I want to say it's worked at least 80% of the time that i've seen it come up this past month.  I'll probably papertrade it for another month and actually backtest it to get more data.

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Overall, I'm twice the position size from what I've been using in last month but I'm nowhere near being comfortable using my speedtrader account just yet.  That and the fact I haven't been as active daytrading since mid january and been extremely lazy during my 1month leave.  I'll be papertrading this whole month again mostly because I need to focus on my Performance Fitness Test this coming march so that I can request to be moved into the TX Air Natl Guard from Active Duty.  If I can get that through, I'll have all the time in the world and limited distractions from daytrading.

On top of that, I'm also:
1) Behind on the courses in WT
2) Trying to keep up at the pace from the videos from arrick russel/jonk/stephen dux/syke's students mainly
3) At least review Tim Grittani's DVD and watch some DASTrader videos before I touch my speedtrader account.

Will I day trade in the nxt few months? Maybe.. but most likely only on thur/fri if I do.

Unproven setups, IMPATIENCE, Chasing and FOMO

Further, I love the 90/10 rule for traders.  90 percent of your effort is spent each day focusing on your existing trades with edge.  10 percent is spent on experimenting with new setups, with small risk.  Record your results on these new setups and size up those working for you.  A consistent effort to expand your trading PlayBook allows you to trade with edge in more market environments.  This minimizes forcing trades when market conditions change.  For example, if you have Market Play edge, you might have been less likely to force Low Float trades this past week, thus minimizes a negative effect of overconfidence. - Mike Bellafiore

Post in progress...

PULM, DFFN, SLOW TRADING WEEK

January Recap - Hella nice setups going supernova left and right... Work started to stress me out and it affected my trading.  Got into some zombie losses with TBIO and called two weeks off to recover mentally.  Papertraded good set ups.

February - Arrived in houston after a 13hr drive for a 4wk leave from work. February 6 traded PULM but very wary since I know what i've been learning from WT Pro is alot of scalping.  I'm using ToS and the hotkeys are nowhere as good as DAS Traders and I'm still inputting orders the slow/cumbersome way.  Because of this, I'm going in very small since I don't like scalping.  Feb 6 was a super slow morning, had a small quick scalp on PULM.  It worked good but I was waaaay too slow for the strategy, got stopped out for 50$..

Feb 7 was super slow as well and I was getting antsy and impatient.. Scalped DFFN, was good but too slow to execute.. Whipsawed hard and lost 3 times what I wanted to risk.  I've already had a feeling that WT strats are very scalpish and nowhere near where I'm comfortable at/where my profitable trades are.  One thing to learn from is though, all my losses from my normal strategy has been from chasing.  The WT scalp entries are exactly where I would be at when I chase and get whipsawed but they would get out with a profit.  Seeing how they execute these scalps I can learn that:

1)  It demotivates me like hell NOT TO CHASE anymore.  This scalp style of trading is very high risk relative to what i've been doing.  With the proper amount of skill/experience, Ross makes it look very easy.  BUT... I'd rather stick to what have worked for me.  Maybe later on once i'm profitable and have a huge cushion, I can afford to learn this and be a degenerate gambler but not in the near future.

2)  Enables to select my entries through the candlesticks instead of indicators allowing me to have an even better/faster/accurate entries than previously.

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I've locked in all my buying power into a swing long to prevent me from making stupid daytrades while I catch up on my courses/review trading tickers and IU dvds.

I'm slowly slowly rather learn the higher priced NASDAQS but only once I've built up a cushion trading tim's style.  I was disciplined for the two weeks I traded it but i also have to attribute the fact that there were tons of plays in January while low float stocks were hot.  Having the patience to wait for the best plays is currently what is I'm having a hard time with.. STUDY STUDY STUDY while the market is slow... ONLY Trade the best setups.
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Goal for the next week FEB 13-17:
1) Trade only Tim's setups, ie no Zombie Trades
2) Paper trade my personal strategy for at least a week
3) Vocalize my thoughts in 3rd person while trading