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.

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.

Again it has been over a month since I last posted on how things were going. The last few months have been great for me and the profitability came at a great time (the light at the end of the tunnel was getting very dim). This job is very hard even when you are profitable but almost impossible to endure at times when you are losing. I have been doing this full time for almost 2 years and am just now seeing my first consistent profits. I have questioned my decision to do this many times but the longer I do it the more it seems that it’s what I was meant to do. The more I do it the more potential I see in the markets and in myself. Nothing is written is stone, especially with this type of work, but I see myself continuing to build, continuing to grind it out, continuing to gain confidence. I have been profitable 9 out of the last 10 weeks and am averaging about 1,200 in gains a week. Seven of the last ten weeks I have have made 1K+ and 4 of those weeks have been 2K+. I have even had a few 2K+ days!! Although the profits are great that does not begin to tell the whole story. My one down week was a large loss, at 2,700, for the week. I lost most of the money in one really bad day where I was down over 3,400 before working the loss down significantly. I reviewed the week that Saturday and was confident I could come back the next week. The following Monday I lost 600+ and then proceeded to lose 1,200+ on Tuesday. So in the last 7 trading days I had lost 4,500 dollars and was well on my way to another big loss in the first two days of the new week. Instead of harping on the negative I stayed focused and was able to put together two strait days of 1,500+ gains on Wednesday and Thursday to end the week profitable. Early in October I had similar scenario where I was down through Wednesday of that week and then lost 900 on that Thursday. I was looking at a relatively large loss for the week and was down over 1,800 at one point on Friday but came back and made over 3,100 in GOOG and once again I was able to end the week slightly positive. Being able to take losses and come back to profitability is one of the biggest changes I have noticed in my trading. I can take losses now because I am confident I can get them back. Losing is a part of trading and you have to be able to take a loss and keep going. I recently bought a book called “Zen and the Art of Poker”. In the book there are numerous rules for playing poker effectively and profitably. The rules can very easily be applied to trading and #20 stood out to me. To me it defines trading to a tee. The rule says: “The true journey of mastery is in each moment”.  The gist of the rule is that poker, like trading, is a never finished journey. About the time you think you have it figured out new events and tribulations come along and prove you wrong. This continual learning process was defined by George Leonard as the “goalless journey”. There is no finish line: the journey itself is the destination. According to Leonard each minute, every moment, every day is the goal. I feel the same about trading: every trade, every minute, every day is my goal and I achieve my goal each day because I am a trader. I know this post is long but also wanted to post a few charts from the last few weeks:

It has been a while since I have posted anything up on the blog about what has been going on in my life and more importantly with my trading. I am still trading full time and glad that I have been able to trade through the historic markets that we are seeing right now. It has truly been amazing to see some of the things that have changed and the events that have taken place. I have been able to adjust and have had some of my best trading gains in the last few weeks.

A few things have changed in my life and my trading over the last few months. I have moved to a neighboring town and have my house for sale (that could take a while). I am studying for my series 7 and  hoping to join a prop firm sometime next year. My approach to trading has changed some and things are getting better for me.

In my last post I talked about my need to take on larger than average size in an attempt to make a day profitable. The problem I am having now, its kinda a good problem to have, is that I am unwilling to take on more size when things are going my way. Just a few months ago that if I was down $200 on the day, I would stop trading and if I was up $500 I would consider that a great day and stop trading. Now it seem that on average days I am able to make $800 to $1,500 with out even trying ( I Know that can change at any time) and my losses are still relativly small. Today was a good example of my unwillingness to get aggressive with a market that I was reading well. I was up over $1,400 during the middle of the day but gave back some gains during the afternoon selloff. I felt very confident that we would rally into the close and that the selling was overdone. I immeditally wanted to be long 2000 of the SSO to attempt to catch the rally. The only problem was that I was unwilling to risk ANY of my profits in order to try and catch the move higer. I would realisticly had to have atleast a .50 stop and 1.00 would probbly be what I really needed. So I would potentally give back all my gains and go down 1k. Admittily, that would be hard to swallow but I was right about the trade and the entry I wanted would have allowed me to catch the move with limited risk. I did not take 2000, 1000, 500 or even 100 on the trade and missed a 1.00 move that could have put me up over 3k on the day. I am wondering if my reluctence to take such trades is a positive defense mechanism that is keeping my greed in check or if I am really to the place I can take such trades on occasion. I guess only time will tell but I am looking to take my size up some becasue my average share size is still only about 400 shares. Also I had been trading the financials exclusively since July but that changed with the sort sell ban. I was able to adjust but I have been trading many other names since then. I am looking to get back to trading a select few names and continue to sharpen my skills for reading my stocks, sectors, etfs and the market. I will try and keep more updates comming for the people who still visit the site.

Well last week turned out to be a profitable week but was a huge letdown. It seemed that I was on the verge of having one of my best weeks in a long time, that was until Thursday came along. I was up over $500 on Monday, lost $126 on Tuesday, was up $444 on Wednesday and had booked over $500 in gains on Thursday and was holding a $350 dollar winner but still lost money on the day. The problem was that I had bought the DDM around 9:00 that morning with 300 shares fully expecting the market to rally back above the January lows. I began to get concerned about the trade when I went back and looked at the chart of the Dow and a chart of the VIX ( courtesy of Stewie). When Oil made new highs and the market continued to fall I began trying to trade my way out the position. This did not work and I ended up losing $740 on that trade alone. I had planned to hold on to the shares for a few days as I believed we were oversold and the market would bounce. New lesson: Never try catching a falling Knife and Screw trying to pick market bottoms and tops. Anyway, the other profitable trade I was holding in the SKF got wiped out when Oil spiked up 3 dollars and the market instantly fell to new lows. So instead of make 800+ on Thursday I ended up with a $330 dollar loss. The disappointment and anger bleed over into Friday and I ended up losing $400. So all told I made right at $100 for the week. This is proof that just one or two mistakes can really screwup your trading week.