At the Opening Bell
Symbol Qty Asset Price Cost Mkt ValueJSAIY 36 Equity 14.10 498.24 504.00
XTN 7 Equity 68.96 479.63 482.72
GULF 20 Equity 18.49 369.60 369.80
CASH 147.68
TOTAL VALUE: 1504.20
The plan today is to hold steady on these but keep an eye on GULF. I should've looked at the volume before I purchased -- there's not much going on here though the charts looked good at the time of purchase. If I find something better then I'll ditch GULF and put the money to work on something else.
On the soft side, I think I have the position size rules in place and I'm happy with them. What I want to work on the next few days is my selection criteria. In particular, I want to figure out basic profit targets and add those to my positioning spreadsheet. I can use those targets, then, to figure out at which point I take some profit (say, 50%). This goes against my grain as far as risk -- I always like more risk than the next guy. But, after getting burned a couple weeks ago by my own greed, I think having some rules in place to defend my profits would be a good idea.
At the Closing Bell
Symbol Qty Asset Price Cost Mkt ValueJSAIY 36 Equity 14.10 498.24 504.00
XTN 7 Equity 68.96 479.63 482.72
GULF 20 Equity 18.49 369.60 369.80
GERN 50 Equity 2.02 108.50 109.44
CASH 32.23
TOTAL VALUE: 1501.58
Around midmorning, I took a look at my screener setup in FinViz and found one stock I liked: GERN. I ran the numbers through my positioning tool in Google Sheets and established 50 shares was reasonable, given the capital I had remaining. I probably should've sat this trade out but it looked good up front.
The fact that something "...looked good up front" isn't good enough, is it? I eyeballed the stock, it's chart (1 year, 6 month, 3 month, 1 month, 10 day, 5 day) but I didn't really quantify anything, identify a pattern better than "Hey, it looks like it's going up," or apply any of the rigor and rules of thumbs on which I've been working. It just looked good, I sort of ignored my positioning spreadsheet (I didn't have the capital to buy the number of shares I should have to counteract the commissions I'd have to pay to enter and exit; though, I did ratchet the risk factor from 2% down to .75% to account for the fact that this was a penny stock.)
Given that the major indices fizzled:
Dow -$10.33 -0.04%
S&P 500 - $9.82 -0.35%
Nasdaq -$37.43 -0.52%
Russell 2000 -$16.89 -1.06%
I shouldn't complain about being down $12.80 or 0.85% -- I beat the Russell and sucked only slightly more than the Nasdaq.
Had I not started the GERN trade I probably would've broken even, taking into account the commissions. However, I should let it run and see what happens. I've got the stop limit order on it, which allows me to put it out of mind.
The dog today was really XTN, the SPDR S&P Transportation ETF, which overall was down 1.75% (that is, $8.43).I felt it dragged down everyone else. But, as with GERN, I've got a stop limit order on it and shouldn't worry about.
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