Today I made only $79. The reason I didn’t make my target was because I didn’t obey trading rules (setting a stop immediately after entry) on AEM, leading me a loss of $96. There is the details:
ARMH:  9:50am   long 200s. Entry price: 25.26. Reason: daily trend support, Grade B rectangle breakout pattern on 5 min bars. Entered at breakout of yesterday’s high. Stop loss set at 1m pivot low at 25.12 ($0.14 risk).
Exit: 100s at $25.43 at 9:59am, second 100s at $25.43 at 10:05am. Reason: uptrend momentum slowed, starting correction …

Happy 2011! The Dow Jones, S&P 500, and Nasdaq all entered the new year of 2011 with a gap up yesterday. The bullish bias is still strong, leading to a slight gap up open today. With the earning season kicking off shortly, the volume of trades is gradually picking up.
Over the past half month or so, I have encountered a different trading strategy of another experienced trader-Toni Hansen. She explained in much more details about the building blocks of the technical analysis of trading, which mainly are support/resistance level, momentum/pace, …

I have adjusted or I should say improved my trading methodology recently to greatly improve my winning percentage of trades that I entered. I will cover it in a separate post later on. In this particular post, I would like to mention three lessons I learned from today’s day trading.
First of all, I’d like to explain that I have made a little bit of change on my strategy of finding stocks. In stead of only looking at news from Briefing.com to find stocks in the morning, I decided to check stocks …

When a novice trader first enters the marketplace, s/he is bombarded with decisions regarding where to begin and what approach to take when it comes to trading and/or investing. There are as many styles of successful trading as there are traders, and which direction a trader takes is a very personal decision. There are four major factors one must consider in making this decision:

Which type of market analysis will I employ?
Which markets should I focus on?
Which strategies should I use for trading?
Which time frame should be my primary focus?

How a …

The market is an ever-changing entity, each day presenting us with different and unique scenarios with no two days every the same. Nevertheless, the market is more or less a reflection of people’s ideas and attitudes and while it is also true that no two people are alike, each and every one of us has something in common with someone else, whether it’s the way we get out of bed in the morning or the foods we prefer to eat. Additionally, we tend to repeat actions, such as preferring to …

I am going to share with you a simple discipline that can really help your trading. This simple little act is often ignored by new traders and overlooked by experienced traders.
Here’s what brought me this subject. Whilst discussing the markets with one of my students he was trying to justify a position in the market he had. This particular trader was an intraday trader who normally trades off a 1 minute and 5 minute chart. His typical style of trading was to try and …

There is an old Chinese saying: one will forget his pain when his wound is healed. It is so true in day trading as well.
I have held stocks overnight for many times in the past. The reason for holding a stock overnight is because I failed to exit the stock at the time I should, which will protect me from losing big. As I didn’t follow the rules and clear the stock at the right price, my loss became bigger and bigger. And the bigger the loss became, the more …

In this week, I traded on all 5 days. I made profit on 4 days, and lost on one. The total profit net of commission for the week is $706. Take a look at my Trade Summary first:

I have made some great trades this week including FSLR, AGU, NFLX, FFIV, etc. I have summarized them in my previous posts on December 1 and December 4.
I also have made some bad trading mistakes this week, including repeat trading, trading Grade F patterns, exiting a profitable stock too soon, and over-trading. All …

Support and Resistance 2 – Swing Highs and Lows
In the last article I stated that support and resistance (for me) is based on previous swing highs and lows, areas of congestion, round numbers and gaps. We’ll now review these types of support and resistance, discussing how to identify them, and how they formed. In this article we’ll start with my favorite support and resistance – swing highs and lows. Why are they my favorite – in my opinion they can form some of the strongest signals.
A swing high is simply …

Today’s Friday, and it is the first week after Thanksgiving holiday. Perhaps institutional traders are already in the holiday mood and many of them have taken on early vacations, both the volume and daily trading range of the general market seemed lower than usual this week.
As a small individual trader though, I still woke up as usual, diligently working through my routines in the morning to look for news stocks to be able to put in my watch list. However, after a whole round of search, I didn’t find many–probably …