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The Choppiness Continues -$2K | Ross’ Trade Recap

Ross_6.26

Hey, everyone. All right, well here we are, third consecutive red day. These are obviously not the streaks that I’m going for. Six out of the last eight days have been red, and we’re really in a market right now that is very familiar to the way stocks were trading in March. No follow through.

Things pop up, as soon as they pop up they get knocked back down. Today the one trade I took, it made a good move from $2 to $2.60, but I didn’t want to chase it and so I waited for the first pullback, and then it did a false breakout and totally rejected. So got stopped out again today, getting a little frustrated, but one of the things with trading is that you’ve got to learn to just roll with the punches. There’s ups and downs, you’re going to have losses. There is no way you can be a trader without having losses, and it’s okay to feel frustrated about it. It’s okay to feel disappointed, but you have to put that aside so when you start trading the next day, you’re clear-headed and you’re focused.

Whatever you use to help you put that aside, whether it’s exercise or it’s meditation, hitting the punching bag, hitting the gym, whatever works for you is fine. You just want to make sure that each morning you get centered, you get focused, and you say all right, I’m going to trade today based on the market I’m in. I’m not going to forget about the losses I’ve had, because those are indicative of the choppiness in the market right now, and those are going to give me that educated intuition to go slow, to take it easy. But at the same time, I’m going to put it aside and just trade based on the action I see right in front of me within the set risk parameters that maybe are established as a result of this market that I’m in. But beyond that, I’m just going to focus on trading. I’m not going to try to get revenge, I’m not going to try to immediately bounce back or do anything emotionally impulsive, I’m just going to trade good quality setups. And today, I think I did it. It’s just unfortunate that we didn’t get follow through. Choppiness continues, but I’ll be back at it first thing tomorrow morning and I’ll see you guys there.

All right everyone, so we’re going to do our recap here again today. Man, third red day in a row. This is getting old. This is getting real frustrating. Last week I had three red days, this week I’m on my third red day, so that’s six red days out of the last ten days, which is a terrible red streak. I’ve had worse red streaks in terms of losing more money and I’ve had worse red streaks in terms of an entire month of being like this and finishing the month in the red, so I’m going to be grateful that I’m green on the month. I don’t have the $40,000 of profit on the month that I had two weeks ago. I’m sitting now at about probably $15,000 on the month, which you know, will just be what it is. It’s profit, it’s progress, it’s more than I had a month ago. It’s not where I want to be, but that’s okay. That’s an important thing, to be able to accept that you’re not always going to get where you want to go right at that very moment in this market. We’re just going to have periods where things are tricky.

The only stock I traded today was CPAH. This one, we didn’t have anything on the watch list that looked good, this one it popped up at $2, it hit a high of $2.05. It did a small micro pullback right here. In a hot market, I would’ve bought it right here, probably for the break of $2.10. But I was like, you know what? Let’s assume this is going to fail, let’s wait. It pops up to $2.25 and I’m like all right, not bad. But do I buy it at $2.25? No, because it doesn’t give us a micro pullback, and at that point it was getting a little extended. It then squeezes up here to 49, it then does a pullback right here at 45 and squeezes up to a high of 60. I traded this one minute pullback from here up to the high of 60. I made money right there, that was good.

Then I got back in anticipating the first five minute candle to make a new high, and I bought right on this candle right here. On this candle, the reason that I bought here was I was expecting that if we broke over this level and broke over the half dollar, we would retest high of day. At that moment, this five minute candle was just about to end, so that meant this candle would most likely break the previous candle’s high of $2.48, and then we would squeeze up to $2.60. Now, in keeping with my strategy here, I’m not going to trade unless I feel confident being aggressive. I felt confident being mildly aggressive on this with 10,000 shares given the fact that it had already moved and it was holding the first pullback, but then it did a false breakout right here.

I really don’t think there’s any way to anticipate that this particular stock was going to do a false breakout right here. I know sometimes people will talk about these indicators they put on their charts that help them predict these false breakouts, but like anything else, an indicator is right a certain percentage of the time, and the rest of the time it’s wrong. Just like me as a trader, I’m right a certain percentage of time, and the rest of the time I’m wrong. Sure, if you used a few indicators and they helped cut out some of your losses, maybe they would help increase your percentage of success, but they might also make you hesitate on stocks that were actually potentially great opportunities, and then you miss winners.

I’m not a big fan of using a lot of those indicators. I trade the market as I see it right in front of me. On this one, it was the only stock moving, it was squeezing up quickly, and I thought it was worth a try. Unfortunately, I was wrong, and it immediately flushed down here to a low of 15. It popped up for a second, I gave it a chance to bounce up thinking that maybe it would make its way back up into the 30s and I could minimize the loss, it didn’t, and as it came back down here I stopped out at 18. 18 was the average price. So, disappointing to say the least. No one likes having six out of ten days being red, or well, actually it’s six out of nine days right now, six out of eight days. That’s terrible, there’s nothing good about that.

I think making matters worse is that despite being in such a beautiful place, the internet is terrible, and so before I start trading each morning week I’ve been aggravated, annoyed, frustrated, my connection is dropping, I’m having a hard time, my trades are a little slower to execute, and when you trade in the market you need to be at peak performance. Anything that takes you off peak performance is giving an edge to the market, and the market already has a built in edge. That’s probably all contributing and not helping, but there simply isn’t a lot of momentum right now. CPAH, I could’ve made money if I was aggressive on it, but I think given what we’ve seen over the last couple of days, it was smart to wait for a pullback, and this pullback worked, and the second one failed. On this one, I wasn’t as aggressive on share size, and then on this one I was more aggressive because I had a little profit from the first one. That’s the way it goes.

Anyways, this month of June is kind of falling apart here in the last couple of days, but two days left, I just want to put this month in the books, put it to bed. Whatever. Take a couple of trades tomorrow and Friday if we see decent opportunities, but I’m not going to be super aggressive on anything until we see the next stock make a 100, 200% intraday move. Something go from 3 to 6, or 6 to 12, or something like that. We need to see that type of move to really bring about a new round of momentum, and some traders have asked how long can the market be slow like this. You know, and the reality is, I’ve had periods of time where I’ve had, the longest period was about six months, and during that six month period I only made about $30,000. I still finished the year up over $200,000 but it was a slow year. It was a slow six months.

That was when Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies were so popular, and I think that they were taking some volume out of the market as people were trading cryptos instead of the stocks themselves. Maybe we’re seeing that right now, but I don’t really think so. I think what we’re seeing right now is just within the range of typical cyclical action. January was hot, February was good, March was cold. April was good, May was good, now June is cold. Hopefully July will be good, August will be good, maybe September will be cold. Maybe we’re going to go in these kind of two month cycles this year. That’s what we’ve been doing so far, so maybe that’s what will happen.

Being down today, I’m right at my max loss of $2000, so no reason to keep trading past it. This for me is acceptable, losing $2000 a day, you don’t want to do that over a sustained period of time, but to do that for a few days is not a big deal knowing that when things pick back up, those 5, 10, 15, $20,000 days will be rolling in. I’ll look forward to it, and on those days I’ll have to remind myself of how bummed out I felt on this trip, and try to really soak in those big green days so the next time it gets cold again, I’m not maybe going into that cold streak in the same way I did this time. But anyways, that’s it from me. I will see you guys all first thing tomorrow morning, 9:15. We’ll do the watch list and see if there’s anything that looks good, and then start trading as soon as the bell rings. All right, see you guys first thing tomorrow morning.

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