A Tech Error & I’m at my Max Loss!

All right, so, time for our midday micro recap. Those of you watching on YouTube and on Facebook, love to have you guys put in comments below and I will come back and answer them later on.

Today is, it’s laughable at this point because it’s just another kind of slightly disappointing day. Now I had two trades this morning that were totally within my strategy. And those were trades on AEMD and PRGO. Well actually all of the trades were within my strategy, but these two trades both were fine. And I made $411 on AEMD and I lost $136 on PRGO. That’s fine.

The trade that is kind of the elephant in the room is the $3600 loser on ALDX. Which puts me down $3600 on the day. And it’s definitely disappointing because this month I haven’t had any really, really big green days this month. I haven’t had a big 4, $5,000 winning day. I made $1200 on Friday. But you know, to have a big red day like this is definitely a little bit discouraging. But I’m not upset with myself about it. Because I didn’t do anything wrong.

Now what I’m going to, I’m going to show you what happened here. And you guys who are watching on Facebook Live I’ll flip this around. Now, what happened was I bought ALDX, right here, at $6.95 and then at $7.00. That gave me an average of $6.97, with 5000 shares. It pops up to $7.05, $7.10, $7.15 and I’m like okay, time to sell. I try to sell half. Nothing happens. I try to sell half again, nothing happens. I try to sell half again, nothing happens. Again, nothing happens. I put my order at $7.25, nothing happens. I try to sell at $6.25, nothing happens. So, what ended up happening here, and I can scroll down. It’s just so ridiculous. Let’s see.

Actually it looks like, that’s irritating. I don’t have the messages back that far, but what was happening was I was getting this error here, which said, “Exceed gross participation.” And it happened again on AEMD when I tried to get in that. “Exceed gross participation.” And that’s what was happening on, I must have logged, I don’t know if I logged out or got disconnected. I don’t know what happened then, but I don’t know why those messages aren’t there from the first trades.

But in any case, what was happening was those orders were all getting rejected instantly. So, I thought after I pressed it once that I was already had sold half. And I look up and I’m like wait a second, I’m still holding 5000 shares, what’s going on? So I press it again, and all of sudden nothing’s happening. I press it two more times and then I’m like, okay, what’s going on? And you know, I realized I was having this problem again. So, this is a problem that I’ve had with Lightspeed.

I mean I’ve had it several times and each time I’ve emailed, I’ve been like, “What’s going on? Why am I having this problem with my orders not going through? And this exceed gross participation error.” And they said that, I’ve gotten different answers from different people. It’s kind of giving me a little bit of the run around. Like I’m not exactly sure what’s going on. Why this is happening. And so, I spoke with them again today and I was like look, I’m going to close my account if I can’t, this can’t keep happening. It’s ridiculous. Today cost me $3600. Like this has cost me more than $10,000 probably in the last two months or whatever.

They said that the reasons it’s happening is because the route that I was using with my hot keys, which is edge X, right here, has like a compliance check. And the compliance check checks the average volume for the previous twenty days. And if my trade is bigger than I think %5 of that average volume, it gets rejected. But here’s the thing, when I buy, I wasn’t buying with edge X. I was buying with NASDAQ, because my hot keys for buying were using a different route.

So that’s why I was able to buy but not sell. In most cases. Now, not in all cases. NASDAQ has slightly different compliance levels. Because I tried to take, I actually tried to take 15,000 shares of AEMD, I was being aggressive, it was kind of silly. But, I only got filled on 5,000 and then I got this error on the rest that I was exceeding gross participation so my orders were being rejected.

Now the thing with ALDX is that today, like yes, yesterday how much volume did this trade? It traded 21,000 shares. So clearly yesterday it traded like no volume at all. But then today it’s traded 8 million shares. And when I was trying to buy it, it had already traded over a million shares of volume. So it’s not like I wasn’t trading a stock with volume. So, I spoke with them about this. I’m like, what’s the deal. They said I should start using BATS as my route. So I’m going to start using BATS as my route. And I’ve gone through and I’ve changed all my hot keys. So I went into my custom orders and I changed all of these to BATS. So I’m going to be routing through BATS instead of EdgeX and apparently that’s going to resolve this problem.

I wish I’d gotten that answer six weeks ago when I first brought it up. But it sounds like now it’s going to be fixed. And hopefully it won’t happen again. So, this is one of these things that I’ve been, in my kind of like free time, I’ve been re-watching Mad Men. You know, the TV show? And I’m on the episodes right now where they’re trying to get the Jaguar deal to advertise for Jaguar. And they’re talking about how the Jaguar’s temperamental and it’s beautiful and it’s fast but it’s not practical you know, and all this stuff.

And I was kind of thinking about how because I trade with these brokers, I’ve used three brokers this year. I started with SureTrader, then I traded with SpeedTrader and then I switched to Lightspeed. And I mean, truth be told I’ve had problems with all three brokers. I had tons of problems with SureTrader, I had problems with SpeedTrader and I’m having problems with Lightspeed. I’ve never not had problems with brokers. It’s just whether the problems outweigh the benefit of using them.

But why do I use these types of brokers instead of just using E-Trade or Ameritrade? Which maybe would be more I don’t know. Maybe it would be better in some ways. The reason is because they’re really fast. When they work they’re really, really fast. My orders go through like that. So, when I jump into these trades for a bull flag breakout or for a gap and go trade, I’m in and I can be out using my hot keys so quickly.

And so it’s kind of like, you know if I started this year, let’s say in the Jaguar. I started with $583 and I just zipped my way up to $100K. And then, you know, I have a couple days like today where the car breaks down. Or where things, I either lose money and I lose ground or whatever but still, compared to the other guy who started the year with his like, whatever, Honda Odessa minivan or something like that. You know, the tried and true, stable, not exotic, not super fast, nothing special, I’m still way ahead of that guy because I had the ability to use the hot keys.

Because I had direct access routing. So today’s one of those days where yeah, there’s some tech issues that have been causing me a problem with this particular broker. I didn’t have this error with other brokers, but I had other ones. And none of them are good. Regardless of what type of error you have, it’s not a good error.

And I had errors when I traded with E-Trade as well. And I had errors when I traded with Ameritrade. Sometimes with E-Trade I’d be able to buy shares and then I wouldn’t be able to sell them on the platform. I’d have to call them in on the phone. And you know, the ten minutes it takes to get through to someone to verify your account and then sell, by that time the trades over. You’ve totally screwed up.

So, this is one of those things that’s part of the deal with being a trader. It’s kind of the cost of doing business. I just, I’m not going to beat myself up about it because it’s really not, there’s nothing, I don’t think there’s anything I did wrong today. I just got the short end of the stick. I’ll bounce back tomorrow. And realistically today, I just looked at my two trades that worked, I’m up a couple hundred bucks. ALDX should have been a 2, $300 winner. And so I should have been around $400 of profit today. Maybe $500. Which would have been fantastic. So I’ll just consider today to be what would have been a decent day, had I not had this issue.

And Oscar, I think there’s a lot of people that have never, ever had this issue with Lightspeed. When I used them a couple years ago I never had this issue either. The difference is I trade with bigger share size now. I’m more aggressive than I used to be. And so that share size on stocks like gap and go stocks, specifically, just happens to fall in this range where if I’m trying to take 5,000 shares of a stock that yesterday only traded 20,000 shares, my order is 25% of yesterdays volume.

Which, you know, is kind of crazy. Although realistically, even if a stock was only trading 20,000 shares and I really wanted to buy it I don’t know why I shouldn’t be able to. But for whatever reason, it’s a compliance thing. And I get it. And I really don’t have hard feelings about it. I’m not, I was annoyed when it happened because it’s annoying to lose money but, you just take these things with stride. Because they’re going to happen. This will happen again sometime in the future.

Maybe sometime in the future I’m going to be trading and my Internet’s going to go down. Or my computer is going to do a restart in the middle of a trade. I mean, this is the luck of the draw. You’re going to have it in any career. Like, with trading, because what we do is so tied into the money and the profits and losses, we just feel very directly connected to this.

This just cost me money. But, you know, when you’re like a contractor and you’re working on a project and you’re working outside, or you’re a roofer and you have ten days of like torrential down pour, you lost money because you weren’t able to work for those ten days. And you know, it sucks. And it’s disappointing but like, what can you do? It cost you money, but are you mad at the rain? It’s just part of the deal.

If I wanted a job where I knew I would consistently make you know, $200 a day, then I could go get a job. Well, $50,000 a year, it’s actually a pretty good job in Vermont. Let’s say $150 a day. If I wanted that consistency then I would have to sacrifice the potential to make a lot of money. And be willing to settle for $100 a day, $200 a day. I’m not willing to do that. I want to be more aggressive. And that means when I have a really good day I might make $22,000 on that day and then I might have a day like today where I lose $3,300.

And at the end of the year, if I make $200,000 then I’m going to be a happy camper. And it doesn’t really matter that I had a couple of bad days here and there. Especially days like today that are really out of my control. And I think that’s the thing. When I do something that’s in my control, then I’m going to get frustrated with myself because I’ll feel like I broke a rule. Or I got too aggressive. Or something like that. But when it’s out of my control, I’m not going to beat myself up about it. And you guys shouldn’t either. Because this will happen to every single one of you at one point or another. It’s just part of the deal.

Anyways, that’s pretty much it for the midday recap today. I didn’t really go over the charts, there wasn’t a lot to go over. ALDX, this was just a gap and go. Same as what we did on MRNS the other day. From 95, popped up to 7.25 and then it rolled over, which was disappointing. AMD, this one, scalped it from the 60’s or from the 70’s up to the 80’s, hit a high of 85. PRGO, took a top reversal on it and got stopped out. I got in a little early at 88, stopped out with a 13 cent loss. That was the right thing to do. And I didn’t get back in it. This is no big deal, it was a good idea.

So, anyways, that’s about it for today and again for any of you guys … If for whatever reason I ended up not using Lightspeed anymore, everyone who’s using Lightspeed who has the $2 per share commission rebate program for the Warrior Pro trading course, there’s a $2.50 per trade. You guys are still going to be able to benefit from that. They want your business. It would just be that it might not be the right fit for my strategy because of this issue I’m having.

It sounds like routing to BATS is going to solve this problem. And we’ll see. We’ll give it a couple more days, another week. And if it happens again then you know, maybe I’ll start thinking about the next switch. But, I’m really happy with Lightspeed in every aspect except for this one. So as long as this gets resolved, and it seems like it will, I’ll be content to keep trading here for a while.

That’s about it for today as we come up on the lunch hour. So I hope you guys have a good lunch break, and if you come back in the afternoon make sure you trade smart and manage your risk. Alright, so, students, I’ll see you at 3:00 pm in our Warrior Pro classroom for a beginner mentor session. And we’ll be able to answer some of your questions. And then we’ll be back first thing tomorrow morning.

All right, that’s it for today, I’ll see you guys first thing in the morning. Bye.

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