Loser After Loser

Gross: -$256.00
Net: -$459.01
Loss From Top: $459.01
Trades: 97
Shares Traded: 240600

Stocks Traded Today (net profit/loss):
Motorola Inc. (MOT): +$155.62
Champion Enterprises Inc. (CHB): +$141.59
Fortress Investment Group (FIG): +$124.22
Merck & Co. Inc. (MRK): +$41.74
Citigroup Inc. (C): -$3.37
Novartis (NVS): -$18.31
Arcelor Mittal (MT): -$18.51
The Dow Chemical Company (DOW): -$29.41
Time Warner Inc. (TWX): -$54.34
Station Casinos Inc. (STN): -$57.46
TXU Corporation (TXU): -$64.15
Micron Technology (MU): -$103.98
EMC Corporation (EMC): -$279.51
Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD): -$293.10

Ahhhh....what a miserable morning it was for me.

Aside from a few system glitches (I'm not going to get into them here...I shouldn't need to blame system problems for my trading problems), I really had a tough time getting anything going this morning.

The very first trade resulted in a small loser......no problem...there were more trades to come.

But then the next trade was a loser....hrmmm...not a very good start.

The next trade was yet another small loser....ahhh...a lousy start to the trading day.

Then the next bunch of trades also resulted in losers and for some reason I just couldn't seem to book a winner.

I was starting to get frustrated as I seemed to take loser after loser and it seemed as though there wasn't going to be an end in sight.

The thing that ticked me off was the fact that all of those morning trades were initially a winner (albeit for only a few cents) and I had plenty of opportunities to take the winner...but I was a little too patient on all these trades and they all ended up either being a loser or a break even trade.

I simply just could not believe all the losers that quickly racked up and by 11AM, I was down close to $800 and I only managed to take one winner during the whole morning.

At that point, I felt like I was painted in a corner and I started flipping from stock to stock trying to find the next trade.

I was so upset that I kept having winners turn into losers I got fed up with the markets and the stocks I was trading that I decided that if they were going to cheese me into taking losers, I'm going to cheese them and trade like a freaking piker and only take one cent winners on everything.

And you know what? It seemed to work....

I was just so pissed that almost all my trades went my way for a few cents and I tried to practice patience, but then the trade would quickly turn back and become a loser, that I decided to just take the sure-thing and take the penny winner.

Jeeeeez...I felt like a frigging cheesy trader and at some point late in the afternoon I just got fed up with everything that had happened and fed up with lousy moves being made that I packed up and just left.

It seemed kind of rough on a lot of traders at the office too....many were dropping like flies as quite a few traders got shutdown. I was mere dollars away from being shutdown too, but I managed to cut my losses by almost half.

I really should have recognized what kind of markets we were in for this morning and I think I would have done things differently had I recognized it sooner.

The key was to take profits quickly, as the overall markets seemed to bounce around quite a bit. I know I missed a lot of good moves on some of the story stocks....I just wasn't fast enough to get myself into a position.

There were at least 5 times in which I wanted to punch into a position, but I was just too slow and I missed....the levels on some of those stocks just melted away too quickly and I never got filled.

Just too many mistakes and too many problems today....time to file it away, make note of what went wrong and move on. Tomorrow is another trading day.

Good Trades
None.

Bad Trades
None.