Light days, means heavy losses.

The day after President’s I realize the big money traders may not show up to work for the sole reason that they have so much money the look for reasons not to come in. When there are no major traders to follow, my trading becomes very difficult, and even impossible. I had 12 stocks on my screen today and 5 of them traded in a 10 cent range for the last 5 hours of the day. Of course as soon as the stock moved above the range 5 cents im there buying. Why? Well, i feel on these days since we have such little movement I have to be in early to catch any run at all. At the end of the day I realize not only is there little movement, but most of the time no movement, which usually ends up meaning I sell as it drops out the bottom of the range in fear its moving in the opposite direction.

Here is a chart of RCL which is one of the stocks I churned the most in today. I took three large positions in RCL on the grounds that it was breaking range. Low and behold it was a fireball in my face when it came right back to trade in the range again. What is the lesson learned here? On light days I will try to be more definitive in the movement out of the range, and give up the first few cents as a confirmation of the movement.

Another issue I have noticed I have is when I know I am not up for the day, I start to get heavy at the end of the day in shares to make up for all my loss trades in one BIG positive trade. I think this has worked a couple times, but in the long run it has definitely been a losing strategy for me. Today it was a winning strategy for a moment before the stock crashed off the high. I had 1000 shares of TRI as it moved to the high. Now on a normal day I know TRI can't handle 1000 shares but today I was hoping and praying it would work well for me. I was in the money for about .30 and my greed took over and I sold none before it came back .30 before I was forced to sell to not take a loss. Again, I forgot the trading was light for the day, or I could have gotten away with this move and broken even for the day. Making one mistake of overbuying the stock I got away with, making the second mistake of not selling for a small profit just was a recipe for this losing day.