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.