Abnormally Cautious

Gross: +$661.00
Net: +$542.61
Loss From Top: 0
Trades: 86
Shares Traded: 107600

Stocks Traded Today (net profit/loss):
Walmart (WMT): +$261.73
Home Depot (HD): +$140.82
Corning (GLW): +$51.94
Ford (F): +$40.86
AT&T (T): +$34.68
Chesapeake Energy (CHK): +$24.10
Hewlett Packard (HPQ): +$15.86
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD): +$2.32
EMC Corp (EMC): -$30.43

I don't know why, but today I traded extremely cautiously and extremely conservatively.

All day I was mainly using 2000 share position sizes and as well as many 1000 share positions. And with most of my positions, I was in and out fast.

This morning we seemed to have a very fast paced market, but I guess I was weary of the system problems we've been lately, and as a result, I was reluctant to put on a trade that really counted.

It could have also been that since the market was moving fast, I didn't want to get caught on the wrong side of a trade, hence the smaller share size.

As it would turn out, today was fairly problem free (at least the system didn't crap out!). Occasionally it was a little slow (especially around the 10AM tank), but the quotes held up (we still had occasional stickies) and the charts worked well (at least up until 3:15PM).

But once the morning was over, the day seemed to be fairly choppy and hence I just scalped 1000 shares at a time. I also had to sit around a lot to wait for the trades to show themselves though.

However, because of my cautiousness, my profits were limited....on that same token, it was perhaps because of my cautiousness that I made very few mistakes today.

Between 1PM and 2:30PM, the markets just didn't really want to do anything and so to kill time I tried browsing around on the net. I then just fooled around with IE on the machine I was using and found that someone had bookmarked Brett Steenbarger's trading articles at:

http://www.brettsteenbarger.com/articles.htm

I visit www.brettsteenbarger.com often, but I mainly just go to his weblog section and of course, I visit his other site TraderFeed daily, but today was the first time I went to the above link.

All I've got to say is that everyone should go visit the above link! There are literally TONS of great articles there! I read several articles during the market lull and sooo many times I thought to myself "Hey! I can relate to what he's writing about!".

You can guarantee that I'll be visiting that site more often whenever the markets are sideways which has a two-fold benefit: 1) it keeps me from trading and 2) I learn something from the articles!

One good trade versus no bad trades today.

That one good trade was on Walmart (WMT). At the time, WMT was downtrending and so I managed to get short 2000 shares (see good trades below).

Now what happened was this - when the Futures started tanking, I put out an order to dump half my position several cents below, hoping I'd get some good price improvement. I also put another order to dump the other half a little lower when I saw that WMT was really going to tank.

I then saw the extent of the Futures tank and I tried cancelling all my orders. Well, WMT approached my orders (price did jump down, but not to where my orders were) and I was trying to cancel with all my might...but alas, I got filled at where I had placed my orders.

Oh well...I'm just glad I didn't get this month off on the wrong foot.

Have a great weekend everyone! I'll be posting stuff on the weekend so be on the lookout!

Good Trades
10:00:11AM - Walmart (WMT) was downtrending while the Futures were also downtrending. WMT started tanking so I tried going short, but got partially filled for 900 shares. WMT continued tanking so I when short an additional 1100 shares 2-cents lower. Just then, the Futures tanked really hard and so did WMT. Unfortunately I couldn't cancel my orders and so I got out as follows: 11-cent winner (100 shares), 12-cent winner (1900 shares) ($239 profit before fees ; Short 900 shares @ $45.74, short 1100 shares @ $45.72 ; Out: 10:00:58AM)


Bad Trades
None.