Trading diary

Back after a month of travel and teaching in Switzerland and off to a nice start. Only have half an hour today, so only made one trade. TEVA was the chosen stock There were a few stocks in play but this one seemed the most clear to me. I saw how bullish the guys at Investors Underground were on it and it did already have a large gap up, so i played it long as well. Seem to have a nice feel for the bottom and scooped up 200 shares. Very small! I wanted to get the mechanics right, and ended up closing it just minutes later for a average but nice win of 23.5cents per share. I am really trying to get the mechanics in and become as emotionless as possible, so this was a good one. My exits were clear as well. The 17.80 area seemed to be quite a bit of resistance so i jumped out when it seemed to stall on the second test and when it stalled again with lots of green prints going through without the stock moving up, i closed out the second half as well. In hindsight i couldve h...

Meh day. Tired because its Friday yadda yadda. Made the exact mistakes that Nate made me aware of last week. In and out and in and out. Burning commissions. Luckily its a green day, but i have to become more consistent. TTPH I entered on what i thought would be a bear flag. But it ended up going back to test VWAP. The problem was that i didnt set my risk properly and just thought id play off VWAP. So when it perked over quite a bit i got scared and got out. Thought i did a good thing by cutting the loss. Turns out i didnt, so on the next bear flag i got back in. This time it ended up dropping down hard and i made back the loss from the first trade and then some. There is a fine line between honoring your stops and being too jumpy. What i should have done is go in only half the size and risk off the high of day. AMD I also entered this one. The entry was fine, but for the wrong reasons. Nate alerted it in chat, and since i meant to go long myself, i just jumped in as well. Wit...

  A great day today. Nate suggested that i trade lower value stocks to capture a larger range. He also thinks im too antsy and that i exit too quickly, which i definitely agree with. On the other hand, im trying to capture profits as quickly as possible, so i do have to be a bit antsy. But letting something run while i have time is definitely something i have to do more, so here we go. SRPT was first. Regarding price, this was already a bit high for me after Nates advice, but i liked the movement, so i stepped in. I put a fishing oder out there at 42.60 for 300 shares. It took a while and was fizzling around just a bit higher, so i hit the Ask to get in with 300 shares and shortly after it dropped down further and picked up the other 300 shares as well. Thought was buying this bull flag and riding the momentum up to see if it wants to go green for the day. When it struggled wih the 43 mark i sold half the position just in case it drops back down but it ended up going higher...

Another annoying day. Tastyworks I bought a call in SGG to take part in a rally in sugar. That one worked out perfectly and saved the day in this account along with COST which is finally rebounding a bit. Im really hoping for a bit more of a bounce in there as that Iron Condor is a big one and it expires next week. Biggest loosers were MCD and CORN. Im still short oil and long gold, so lets hope that works out eventually. Plus500 After an alert from Trading Safely i shorted USD/CAD which would have worked out fine if i hadnt had my stop set too tight. It seems that i just dont have the capital to trade anything other than VXX for the moment, so ill just keep on shorting that until im back up. This is going to be a long and painful road. Thinkorswim Weed stocks took a nosedive back down again but not as much as the gain from yesterday. Im suspecting though that tomorrow theyll keep falling. Since ive decided to keep my ToS account i am also going to keep those two stocks around at least...

Saturday was a great day for my real money accounts. Not so much for the day trading practice. Plus500 After all the losses recently i decided to make this purely my volatility account. So whenever VXX spikes ill short it in here because of the leverage. Other than that i wont be trading in here anymore. The spreads are just too wide and its hard to make profits like this. Ill shift my futures trading to Tastyworks where ill be trading the respective ETFs first until i have enough capital for the actual futures. Tastyworks Great day. QQQ didnt bounce back much today and premium decayed nicely. I started trading some commodity ETFs like CORN and WEAT and im happy that im doing this in here. Lets see how this goes. Thinkorswim For once the options overpowered the weed stocks and turned a small loss into a small gain. Nice. I have also put through the transfer request to shift half the accounts money over to Tastyworks. I will keep this account open though with a very small amount of mone...

There seems to be some cracks appearing in /NQ. Its about time! Tastyworks Made a nice profit today as my two QQQ positions finally found the green again. About 50% of todays profit in this account is because of the Q's. CCL also helped. This put spread was way too big when i put it on but at least it seems to be working out. I have put on quite a few positions today. A Iron Condor in COST with slightly long delta and a few verticals in MCD and other underlyings. In some trades with very short term outlook i actually bought puts outright which i know is against the Tastytrade rules but i feel like i want to see if this can work for short swing trades. I had to realize however that ive used up almost all my buying power. Tomorrow ill have to look at taking some winners off the plate. Plus500 CFDs Went long gold yesterday but it ended up dropping back a little bit. Small position, small loss so far but im staying in it. Hopefully Gold will rally a bit when the indexes start crumbling...

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...

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...

Another good day with "overnight" trades. Plus500 CFDs The Silver and GBPUSD positions both developed really well over night and i left them on during the day. While the pound pulled back a bit, Silver kept dropping and i made a really nice profit on it. When it started rebounding in the evening i took both off. COP also developed nicely today and is just tagging the 200 moving average now. But ive also set a hard stop in case it drops when im asleep. Depending on how it develops tomorrow ill decide whether ill take profits or not. I also went long FTR small today, that thing needs time to develop, lets see how it goes. ToS Options Weed stocks accounted for a small loss today. There are a lot of bad long term positions coming off today, so i hope the portfolio will look a bit better after. Im long FTR in here as well and hope itll help along with the Corn options. Ill have to decide what to do with a long June call in X. Its positive but will loose more and more ex...

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 account turned down ever so slightly again today, i have to say though, the last two days were way more painful. I am pretty short now, having added shorts in JPM, XLF and IYR. Im also eyeing the semiconductor sector, based on some pointers Shaun Downey gave us. On the other side im hoping for CORN to go up in the next few weeks/months. I bought a few October 20 Calls, trying a anti Tastytrade ish traditional strategy for a change. Shaun Downey has sent out a nice report on corn last night and how it looks to be the worst year in the last decade, so that hopefully works out. I have also bought back the short call from the big call spread in TTD and it seems to have paid off. Lets hope that one keeps running a little more. Overall im not too happy with my ToS account. Its going down more than going up and i will stop putting on positions for now so i can transfer over a good chunk of money to Tastyworks as soon as possible. In the CFD account i have closed out two more sho...

Took another downturn in my ToS account today. Weed stocks accounted for about 2/3 of it. I also had bought a $5 wide call vertical in TTD after it had come up in the IU swing trading chat. I looked at the chart and the 60min looked like a perfect ABCD pattern. I think TTD is not liquid enough to sell spreads but i guess i was too greedy and possibly also ignored some of the Tastytrade setup rules because of that. In any way, despite TTD rising nicely, the spread accounted for almost all of the rest of the loss today. In general, my ToS account has been turning down recently, but i hope i can transfer a lot of money over to TW (tastyworks) soon so i can finally build a lasting account and hopefully soon get over $25k to get a bit more freedom with naked options as well as getting rid of the pattern day trading rule. Not much news in the CFD account. All positions lost a little bit because VXX had a up day. Patience here. I didnt add any other positions yet. With VIX dabbling around 10 ...

This is a personal diary to hold myself accountable in my trading journey. I want to be able to recap what i did well and what i didnt do so well and i want to do it for the public to see. What i will be posting about is: - Options trades on Thinkorswim - Options paper swing trades on Thinkorswim - CFD trades on Plus500 - Practice paper day trading on Thinkorswim I have quite a few plans for the future. I plan on keeping the CFD stuff going only until i have enough capital to trade actual stocks. CFDs are actually not what i want to trade because its basically betting on stuff instead of trading it. The only good thing is that they give me way more leverage than other methods so i hope to grow the account to around $50'000 and then move it all over. I also just opened a account with Tastyworks which i will use as my main trading platform. It will take a bit of time though to close out all my positions in my Thinkorswim account and move that money over. I also think i want to keep T...