I traded a little more aggressively today. I traded with 200 shares on most of my trades, but I forced myself to be more patient, but alas, not patient enough. In the early AM I was long RIMM and AAPL as they started breaking out. I entered the trades early and suffered fairly large drawdowns in both positions. The morning was looking quite bleak. I made myself stick with my trades, and was able to add to AAPL at the lows and RIMM as it started moving back up. My patience paid off partly because I held these two through a $180 drawdown each, but I was not able to hold on long enough.

AAPL was moving up nicely and I turned that loser into a profit of $250. “Nice trade!”, you might say, but look at the chart below….

As you can see, I held on just long enough to miss the biggest part of the move. Idiot! This could have been an $800+ winner for me, making up all my losses for the week, but I got impatient and took my profits early.

I managed to do the same thing with RIMM.

Later in the day, I was looking at SPWR and FSLR. Both were up big, but SPWR was not showing much strength. I noticed a nice wedge pattern so I decided to short the stock for a move lower. I had a nice stop level just above the highs on the consolidation. Everything was in place and SPWR broke down HUGE. But was I in the trade for the big move…..Nope. I didn’t stick with my trading plan and exited the trade losing $45. The following chart is even better than the AAPL and RIMM charts above. Enjoy!

I traded a little of MA and suffered a big drawdown again, but thankfully I was able to hold this position long enough to get out with minimal damage. That crazy stock moves around so wildly it is hard to have a good stop in. My last two trades of the day were in SHLD. This trade was a breakout trade with a close stop. I was able to add on the way up and got a great fill on half of the trade. I sold the second part at the market and IB took like 5 seconds to fill the order all the while the price was dropping. I guess there was just too much being offered, but I got a terrible fill as you can see. I traded SHLD again just before the close for a small loss, but it wasn’t worth marking on the chart.

Overall, I had a good trading day. I stuck with my guns on RIMM and AAPL in the AM, but didn’t have enough patience to let AAPL run. I need to work on putting in trailing stops on these momentum stocks so that I can catch the big moves up, but I have just never used a trailing stop before. I also didn’t stick with SPWR. Those two trades alone could have netted me over $2k today if I had simply held on. Although I missed a lot of money today, I feel like I am making progress here. My drawdowns in AAPL and RIMM didn’t bother me because I had a mental stop level and I was confident in my trade. I got out of the SPWR trade mostly because FSLR was starting to break up some with the market and I didn’t want to lose big if SPWR followed suit. Bad decision, but at least I am seeing the setups. Developing……