Just a few charts to show what I was looking at and trading today. The chart below shows my entries indicated by the red arrows; my stop levels indicated by the white lines and my exits; the first green arrow is where I got stopped on 500 shares and the second one is my limit exit.

Here is what the chart looked like after I exited at 84.35.

If I had not used such a tight stop I could have caught this move with full size and been done for the week. Oh well, the market was a little thin to start with and is still acting squirrelly, so I don’t want to risk too much capital.

In line with this trade, I noticed MA setting up a nice Inverse Holy Grail (IHG) on the 5min chart with two Doji consolidation bars. I thought seriously about shorting it with 500 shares, but erred on the side of caution. Would have been a sweet trade. So it is jut before lunch and I have made $325 on one trade, missed some big moves and I am done for the day. I should have kept my stops looser and not tightened my profit target. V was weak as the market was moving up to fill the gap but I didn’t read the signs correctly.

I am back at my home office this week which has allowed for some trading time. I have recently started taking more size on my trades and my PnL is showing it. I haven’t noticed any heightened emotions with this increase in size, but I am keeping my eyes open for potential changes in behavior. Today was a rough day for me; partly because of positions going against me and additionally because of missed opportunities.

I got up at 5:00 this morning and scanned my watch-list and highlighted about 30 names to keep an eye on after the open. But my fist mistake came yesterday, by the way of not acting on my intuition. I emailed Stewie yesterday to ask him “Do you like GLD at these levels for a 1-2 week swing?” and he replied “tough call. stop at 110 if you choose to take it.”, which was exactly what I was thinking. I wanted to take the trade at $112.75, but I knew having a stop loss at $110 would mean an uncomfortable loss with 500 shares. I decided to hold off on the trade, even though I knew that if we sold off on the indexes that GLD could run. Well, I was right.

I didn’t realize that GLD had mad a run until Tradeitup and I got to chatting about some of his overnight holds. Missing this trade is made more bearable given the fact that I also averted disaster by not getting filled on 2,000 shares of MGM near yesterday’s close at $16.42. That trade would have been bad on the open.

On to today’s trades. One of the stocks on my scan list from this morning was CRM, which has been running like crazy since February. After a good breakout on Thursday, and two days of consolidation I was looking for a break of $90. I picked up 1,000 shares at $88.46 and had a stop in place at $87.40.

It wasn’t long before it became apparent that the gap-fill in SPY was a trap and the market took a dive.

After the sell off commenced, I tightened my stop on CRM to $87.65, which got me out before the first tall red bar at around 10:30.  Just before 11:00, immediately preceding the market sell off, I took a long in ESRX after looking at a daily chart on this one. It seems that as soon as I got long the bottom fell out and I had a $400 loser on my hands. Looking at the chart below you can see my entry on the white bar right at 11:00. What horrible timing!

My total loss today was $787 and change, which is less than 1% of my portfolio value, so I am not too troubled. I am now holding 1,000 of BCSI and 1,500 of SOA. Additionally, though most traders you ask would say to stay away from stocks that are reporting, I have 50 shares of FSLR as a interesting side bet. I am in at $128.96 with a stop at $123 in case they miss horribly. I am keeping my fingers crossed that we will get a pop on the open, but I am not going to loose any sleep over it.

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If anyone that followed this blog in the past is still out there, I just wanted to let you guys know that I am still alive. A lot has changed in my life over the past two years with the move and change in careers, but it has been a great experience. For those of you that don’t know, I am no longer a financial advisor. I left Ameriprise Financial at the end of December 2009 and I will probably never get back in the finance industry.

I worked as an advisor for a year and four months, and although it was a struggle to keep up with paces the whole time, there were moments of triumph and excitement. I met a lot of great people and made a few friends for life. I learned a great deal about working with people and forcing yourself out of your comfort zone to get clients. When you are on the front lines in the middle of the kind of recession and market sell off that we saw, you get to observe the many ways people deal with stress and loss of capital and confidence in the system. Some people, both young and old, are calm and collected, while others will go to cash even in their 401(k) and wait until the market comes back to get back in. It is a fascinating study in human emotions.

As an advisor I didn’t have a lot of time to trade like I had hoped, and the commissions were so high that I had to hit a home run – which I had a few of – to even justify the transaction. My best trades were outlined in my post from August 2009, but let’s focus on the bad ones for now. My worst trade, and regrettably, one that I am still holding on to, was to buy VXX at $52. It is now trading just above $21.50, which is close to a 60% loss. Talk about a bad trade. Although I am down over $6,000 on this trade, and that pretty much wipes out half of my big winners, it’s not the money that bothers me. The fact that I have made the rookie mistake of holding onto my losers is quite frustrating. Despite this glaring faux pas, I am still confident that I can continue to be a successful part-time trader.

My strategy right now is to continue learning from Stewie by way of The Art of Trading subscription service and keep making cake on his calls. Stewie has done a great job in his first year of offering this trading service and he has helped me make a lot of money. You can see my review of The Art of Trading on investimonials.com.

You want to know recent results? On Monday I took Stewie’s alert on X, NETL and PEI. I exited the first two a few minutes before Stewie’s sell alert and I closed PEI right before the close instead of keeping it as an ONH. Since I am working from home most of the time, I can trade and work in tandem. Those three trades maybe took an hour out of my workday, we’ll call it my lunch break, and I came out with $878. And you thought lawyers made a lot of money per hour. Yesterday was not as successful due to stupidity on my part. I took on too much size on one trade that was my own idea. I got long 1,000 of COL at $62.73 after looking at the 30-min chart below and seeing the coiling action. I set my stop at $62.40, which was too tight, because I had too much size and couldn’t put it at $62 where it should have been. I got stopped on the sell off and ended up losing $330 on that one. I then redeemed myself by taking Stewie’s long on IVN. Again, I did not choose to swing this one and sold about 15 minutes before the close for $321 gain which nearly erased my COL mistake earlier. Lessons learned: don’t take too large of size when you can’t stand the loss at a reasonable stop level and stick with taking the alerts and stop thinking you are qualified to pick setups.

It has been over a year since I gave my farewell address, stopped trading, moved to another state and started a new career. A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then, and there is no way I can update you on all of it (nor do you really want to hear all about my personal life). I guess the two main questions I want to answer are: How is the new career treating you? and Are either of you still trading, and if so how are we doing?

Career

I believe my last two posts were about my Series 7 and 66 exams. I did pass both exams as well as my state insurance license exam. I am now registered in seven states; AL, MS, TN, AK, TX, GA and TN and I am in the process of getting my FL license. I wanted to be able to blanke the entire southeast because I have contacts in all of those states. As with any career, there are aspects of it that I love and others that I hate. Over the past year, I have slowly learned so much about myself and the business, but there is much, much more to learn. As you might imagine it has been VERY hard to bring in new clients because of the state of the economy and the fact that people have been scared to death of any investments after the carnage that ensued last year and through the March low.

Over the past year I have worked very long hours and done quite a bit of traveling back and forth to MS and GA. Last week I put in over 70 hours in the office, and that doesn’t count some time spent at home doing research and analysis. The hours are starting to take a toll on me and I have started to back off some to try and maintain some amount of a work-life balance.

What I’ve found is that for the first two years you have to be a marketer first and an advisor second until you can grow your book of business. After you establish yourself and have a good source of recurring revenues, then you can dial back the marketing and increase your time in the office and time with clients. So far I have acquired 25 clients and have just under $2,000,000 in total assets under management. A pretty crappy year all around.

The last two months have been good and brought in more business than the preceding five months combined. I am very optimistic about my long-term prospects as a financial advisor, but getting clients and money in the door immediately has proven to be difficult. Enough about my career. If anyone has any specific questions about the life of a financial advisor, feel free to shoot me an email and I will be more than happy answer them.

Trading

From my farewell post back in May until about November I had quite trading cold turkey. As matter of fact, I wasn’t really even watching the market on a daily basis other than what I could force myself to listen to on CNBC. In November I finally got settled into the new city, apartment and work routine and I started to look at the market again. Since then I have been somewhat active with swing trading. I just signed up for Stewie’s daily Art of Trading service and have nothing but good things to say about it thus far (and expect nothing but good going forward). I see myself being much more active from here on out with Stewie’s recommendations, and swing trading my own ideas as well. I was talking to Tradeitup today about my recent success with trading and it has really brought back the rush of trading; something that I really miss. What has been working for you?; you might ask… well, below is my current holdings and a few trades that I have taken lately.

Current Holdings

I am also holding onto a Harrah’s Casino bond from 49 that matures in 2012. Speaking of bonds, take a look that this chart. This is a Ford Motor bond that I bought back in January and sold last week.

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That’s right, a 110% profit on a bond in six months. And, if you include the $475 coupon that I received in March, it’s more like 120%. That has to be my best trade ever. You can also see I made some money with USO. Not shown here is a $1,425 profit in FXI and a $2,550 profit in  UYM. I also have some other small winners and losers in my current holdings. All told, I have booked over $10,000 in profits since November; not bad.

Hopefully this will give HPT and others the update they needed, and maybe even spur me to continue posting occasionally going forward. It’s now midnight and I need to be at the office early tomorrow to get caught up before the weekend. HAPPY TRADING!!!

- Ainkurn

P.S. Tradeitup wanted me to give a brief update for him as well. He is still trading and doing well. He has had a good streak of consistent profits, but continued to be very conservative with profit targets and risk management. I’ll do my best to bully him into posting his trading ideas or recaps again.