Trading diary

Better late than never here is the review of the trading from Monday. I have been practicing scanning on my own and i seem to be quite good at it. However, i didnt end up trading any of the stocks i scanned for as i only look for symbols worth $20 and lower since that works better with my account. I ended up going with Nates watchlist though. I had NVDA up on the starter screen again and it ended up being the only ticker i traded. I still seem to be trading nervously. In hindsight it wouldve been smart to wait for the g/r break. At least i could have taken off half of the position. Timing is definitely still the factor. I also made a mistake when i tried to close the position for the first time and sold a second lot of 100 shares. Luckily it ticked down and i closed immediately as i had planned in the first place. Anyways, its another nice green day. That RLOG position can be ignored as i made a mistake in the last session when i was experimenting with stuff after finishi...

We got volatility back eh? holymoly. I was so angry yesterday that i didnt post anything. But today im back. Plus500 I had forgotten about a GTC limit order in IWT that got triggered yesterday and was down a bit. So over night ive set a stop really close so that if it goes any higher, it would kick it out. Turns out the market is crazy right now and it turned into a nice winner which im not planning on taking off just yet. Im looking on shorting more VXX again soon. Hopefully this wasnt just another 1 day spike. Doesnt feel like a 1 day spike. I also traded some oil over night. Working much better, now that i have some kind of system with stops and limit orders instead of always going in with a market order. Turned out to be a small winner, but it was good practice in working with stops and moving them up. They do have a trailing stop feature on plus500 i want to try that one next time. ToS Slightly down, but not much. Mainly due to weed stocks and my short VXX position but that one i ...

Plus500 CFDs Last night i took off a huge looser in wheat which basically eviscerated all the gains from the last months. Stupid. I vowed to stay more mechanical and not hold anything over night thats a looser. So at the beginning of the evening i shorted Soybeans right before their last spike up before this beautiful drop. But... i had lost a small amount by the time i went to bed, so i got out. missed out on a huge move there. If i had just waited until after i read a few pages in bed, i wouldve probably left the trade on or at least set a stop to the recent high... but no, i got out for a loss and missed out on this huge move. Once again i had a good entry but missed because i couldnt stomach the fluctuations and because i didnt do everything i could. Frustrating. Tastyworks ORCL earnings play fell flat "bigly" :) Luckily i play those really small. Also nice to see a small market selloff into the close which saved my RUT calendar and turned my QQQ positions from losers int...

It didnt look good last night when i went to bed. But turned out to be not too bad of a day. Plus500 CFDs I had bought wheat yesterday and of course it started dropping and dropping but im trying to be more patient with the trade and stomach the volatility for a longer term upside. I got out of gold for a profit and bought back silver for a small loss after it had recovered a bit from a bigger loss. I had entered a few stocks like FTR or AFL but they all went against me and stopped out. Im also noticing that in this account, the premium for holding stock positions is extremely high and im not going to do this anymore. Tastyworks I had sold a RUT calendar yesterday that went against me but recovered nicely in todays downturn. Lets hope for another down day tomorrow. Also for QQQs sake. Both the IC and the short call spread were happy today as they made back some gains. CORN is continuing to underperform and its painful to remind myself that this is a long term position. I put on a earni...

Had a great Friday. Gold went down nicely and with the drop in equities, all of the other accounts did well too. Was quite happy. Then today came along and while im not super red today, it felt meh. Plus500 CFDs Put on a few positions last night, short Gold and Silver and took off some of the energy shorts as i think Oil might want to bounce here. Also shorted AFL which went against me over night. First it looked like Gold/Silver might make up for the loss, but its lunchtime now and Silver is bouncing and Gold came back up a bit as well. Im going to keep holding though as they both have broken key resistances and i see a bit more downside. Tastyworks I added a skewed iron condor in QQQ, taking advantage of the high implied volatility especially compared to the SPY and DIA. Also added a short put spread in XOP. Im pretty short in here now and i think i want to add some long delta in form of a short call spread in VIX or something like that, just to hedge a bit of the risk as overall i s...

...will be punished. Immediately. CFDs After all the successful trades in the last week, i looked at Wheat and Sugar yesterday and saw that Wheat had broken some significant resistance to the upside and sugar did the same to the downside. So i thought id get involved. Especially Sugar looked really good. I went long /ZW and shorted /SB. They were bouncing around quite a bit from green to red and back. I thought about taking them off with small profits, but one thing i felt i did wrong in previous trades was pulling out early. So i decided to leave them on over night, which was a mistake. Especially Wheat punished me hard. I still have them on and i will see how they go today, but im pretty sure i will be locking in quite a bit of a loss here unfortunately. I think the problem were neither mechanics or plans. The problem is just that those instruments are crazy leveraged so that i just cant stomach the fluctuations when they go against me. But i guess thats what i will have to live with...

Good start into the week! CFD - Plus500 I shorted a bit of /NQ last night and it dropped nicely. I feel like a lot of trades im doing are chasing trades when someting is moving a lot. I think the reason why they seem to work out is because the size/margin in Plus500 is so high that i can scalp the smallest of moves for a profit. After that i also went short Silver and GBP/USD which are both green today and i bought COP on a alert by the trading safely guys. That one is working out nicely as well. ToS Weed stocks moved up while Corn took a hit. Overall the P/L are green for today but im glad im not putting on more positions in here. Tastyworks Corn lost here as well of course but since thats a very long term trade im not too afraid about it yet. I put on a put calendar in IWM and a short call spread in QQQ just to get my beta weighted Delta back to neutral. The account is down a bit but i feel confident that by managing Deltas, Theta and Vega properly ill be able to beco...

I didnt post yesterday because despite it being a green day it wasnt spectacular and i didnt put on any new trades or anything like that. But today i finally got to put on my first trades with Tastyworks. Im so happy that this is finally working! I was a day one waitlist people but because im in NZ i had to wait until now to get going. I put on a SPY calendar for $230. Front month is 43DTE so im going quite far out with it but i kind of think that the market will go just a liittle bit further up before it comes down and volatility will speed up a bit, so that seems to be a nice setup. I had also tried to buy a few CORN calls which didnt get filled unfortunately. Ill give it another try tomorrow. I like the ABCD pattern thats forming there and from what i read the fundamentals look really good for a nice rise. ToS The weed stocks for once were flat and the options positions actually gave me a bit of a gain. CORN is working out well, X is working out well, TTD is volatile as F*...

ToS Weed stocks took another hit today and yesterday. That hurt. Other positions arent going that well either at the moment. Its good that ive stopped putting on positions. I have to decide what to do with the weed stocks. In one way i want to buy more since its pretty safe to say that Canada is going to legalize weed. In another way i just want to be rid of the position and move on. ToS papertrading I requested real time data for this account and im preparing the softwares layout so as soon as i manage to get out of bed on time ill be able to start day trading practice. As for the account itself. Its taken a bit of a down turn as well in the recent up move, but i think im short enough in other positions that in todays tiny down move some of this might have come back at least a little bit. Plus500 CFDs My last short VXX position lost as well in the last few days since /VX was on the rise. its been so much on the rise actually that i added another 100 short shares of VXX ...

I made a mistake in my CFD account yesterday during the day (NZ day). I wanted to short Gold as the chart really looked good and i thought its due for a step down, looking at the longer term charts. So i set up the trade on Plus500 and pressed the button. Right away i realized i had forgotten to put in my custom position size and had just left in the Plus500 standard size. So instead of my usual 20 ounces of Gold, i had shorted 200 ounces. I couldnt take it off right away because the spread that Plus500 makes its money with had put my position $70 in the red. (Thats also the reason why i only want to stay with CFDs as long as i have to be able to have a account big enough to pass the PDT rule. Anyways, i was at work and i had stuff to do so i monitored it only sporadically, which is another mistake, but it was going my way and was up about $150 after just a few minutes. So i kept it on and watched it go to $350 before i had to focus on work and left it unmonitored for about 2h. Next ti...