Successful Day Trades- Jan/Feb 2010

The boxes above open up detailed pictures for the trades I talk about in this post.  Not sure why it doesn’t just show the pictures in my post but whatever.

I try to keep trading a learning experience.  By posting some of my trades I can document them better, look at what I did right or wrong, and try to do as well or better in the future.

Here are two trades that started out with the intention of day trading.  MAT had just released good earnings and was down on the open so I decided to jump in when it looked like it had reached a low.  I track the lows and highs by using stochastics.  My grandpa taught me about them and I learned more about using them in the book “The Master Swing Trader”.  Basically if a stock’s stochastics are low when looking at daily, hourly, and 10 min ticks, that’s a pretty good time to buy (at minimum I prefer the hourly and 10 min tick stochastics to be low on day trades).

Mattel didn’t have enough volatility to raise enough for a decent day trade, but that also made it safer to hold over night.  I still ended up selling  early, but profit is profit.  MAT was a pretty slow mover but the circumstances made it a pretty safe trade.

CNX is one of the stocks I’ve been trading since back in the winter of 2006, when I first realized how profitable trading could be.  This was a quick day trade I just made today.  Pretty easy to follow.  CNX was on its way to dropping a little more than a point from it’s early high and I put in a limit order at 46.  I considered putting in a limit order at 45.8 but I was worried that would be too low.  The plan was to sell it quickly around 47.  With the stochastics on the 5,10, 15 minute tick and daily tick charts low, and today being an up day for the DJIA,  the odds were definitely on my side.  CNX made a quick bounce back.  I debated whether to sell at 47.04 or 47.14, where 47.14 would make $100 plus cover my commissions.

I ended up entering a limit order at 47.14, and changing it to 47.04 when it looked like the stock price was backing off.  My limit order at 47.04 went through, the price did back off.  It ended up bouncing back above 47.14 shortly after.  I don’t think I sold too early.  It might have been possible for me to hold those shares for a couple of weeks and sell them above $50, but I made my money faster and safer.

The way too make money with small stock price movements is to buy a lot of shares.  Multiples of 100 work well because it’s simple to calculate how much money you’ll make.  For example, in both of these trades I bought 100 shares.  Any difference between buy and sell prices is simply multiplied by 100 then I subtract commissions.

So far this year:

1 short sell gain

4 gains from traditional trades

4 losses from traditional trades

Ratio- money lost: money gained ~ 2:1

I’ve gotten off to a bad start this year (more on that later).  I’m not going to just post successful trades and act like I never make mistakes.  Last year however I had a very successful year.

Some ratios from last year’s trades:

total dollar amount of gains: losses ~ 10:1

# gains: # losses ~ 4:1

dollar amount of average  gain: loss ~ 2:1

My current goal in investing is to learn from what I’ve done right in the past and keep in mind what I’ve done wrong in the past.

Been kind of sick of subbing on youtube

When I first started subbing on youtube I didn’t know hardly anything about Korean music.  I started out with my first translation, Epik High’s “One” because the widespread translation at the time left room for a lot of misunderstanding.  After that I took requests and ended up doing mainstream stuff like Taeyang, some Big Bang and general love songs.  I also tackled Epik High’s album “Pieces, Part One” and eventually “Remapping the Human Soul” out of personal interest.  Taking requests for mainstream music worked out for the time because I had a whole lot to learn at first.

Translating mainstream, and even Epik High was an important time for me, like a stepping stone.  Soon I took on Nell’s albums and MC Sniper’s “How Bad Do You Want It”, and I have to say I am much more confident in my translations of them than my earlier Epik High translations.  Time took it’s course and I ended up finding the Korean music that I enjoyed the most, so I stopped taking requests.

Subbing isn’t a job for me, I did it because I enjoyed finding new songs and learning what they meant.  I also did it to improve my Korean,  out of love for the country, and out of a sense of responsibility to do something meaningful while careless white kids continually give Americans a bad name in Korea.

When I had found what I considered to be just about the summit of Korean music, translating lost its thrill.  It feels like I’m listening to the best of the best when I hear Nell’s and Drunken Tiger’s songs.  There are other songs I still enjoy listening to, for example Kebee- and I’ve been listening to a lot of underground on one of my subscriptions’ channels- but it’s gotten hard for me to feel that old thrill like I’m finding something new and great.

Besides being busy with school and my life, translating rap takes a considerable amount of time for me because I still do it in steps to make sure I catch most of my mistakes and to make sure I understand everything in context.  When I continue subbing, it will have to be out of feeling that same thrill that I felt at first.  The only place I can still feel that is from Drunken Tiger and underground music.

Potheads break my balcony kitty ladder

So Heejung and I had had this idea for awhile.  We wanted to have a ladder, or some kind of platform our cats could use to jump up to and down from our balcony because we live in a second floor apartment.  We have three cats.  One of them can go out the pet door and get up and down from the balcony just fine by himself.  The other two, however, need us to open the front door for them so they can go down the stairs.  Prince Loren actually needs us to go outside with him like bodyguards so he can feel comfortable.

The situation had started to get inconvenient, because the daddy’s girl, Max, would sit by the door and meow every night right at that time of the night when the temperature drops dramatically.  So, when Troy (my stepdad) offered to make us a cat tower we thought a kitty ladder to hang from our balcony would be more practical- and perhaps a little more sightly.

Troy welded the frame out of stair railing they had just removed as part of a big remodeling project.  He ended up spray painting the metal frame red- to match the rails on our balcony- and he secured a wooden platform to it.  The end project was magnificent.  It took Troy a couple of days and we had just picked up the kitty ladder from my mom and Troy’s place the afternoon of the same day as the proceeding incident.

Troy came over to our place and hung the ladder from the rails.  After he took off, it only took Tigger (our little explorer) a couple of seconds to figure out how to use it.  At first he tried to figure out how to jump off the balcony over the kitty ladder, like it was some kind of obstacle.  After he saw that it was stable though, he caught right on and started using it.  Max was a lot harder to teach.  She can be really frightened, confused, or silly sometimes and I think she was being all three when she didn’t know why I was below the balcony instead of upstairs giving her attention.  I tried to get her to see that if she jumped on to this formerly perfect, stable platform, she could be right next to me and everything would be alright.  Max was going to take some time.  And Prince Loren picks up on things pretty well all by his royal self.

While Heejung and I were inside eating dinner, waiting for that time of night when the temperature drops drastically and Max decides she wants to go outside, there was this awful clanging sound outside.  I opened the door to see this kid with an afro trying to climb up to the third story balcony.  “Hi?”.  “Hi…”. “Did you get locked out or something?”  “Yeah…”  I acted natural but I really was planning on keeping an eye on things.  It didn’t look like he was going to get very far anyways.  He gave up climbing and went up the stairs and was talking with somebody.   After a couple more minutes of them hanging out in the stairwell, I went out to see what was going on and if I could help.  I’m a somewhat athletic guy and climbing up to a balcony is a pretty menial task for me.

“You’re really locked out, huh?”  I was talkin to the kid with the afro again but I looked up the stairs and instead of seeing the chick that lives on the third floor there was another dude with a case of beer.  So I talked with them to see if they had a case for themselves but they just didn’t.  “I think she’s sick laying in bed…”  “I’m living here temporarily…” “My phone’s dead so I can’t call her…” “I don’t know her number so you can’t call her” that’s when the downstairs neighbor started talking with them and I walked quietly back in my apartment and locked the deadbolt kind of subconsciously.

They ended up getting in to the apartment somehow.  After that I carried Prince Loren outside so I could place him on the kitty ladder.  When I got under the balcony though, I found the lower frame and platform lying on the ground broken off at the welding joints.  My poor kitty ladder…  Before the sorrow could sink in too deep I saw about four policemen and a man out of uniform walking with the 3rd story girl toward her apartment.  “Is this about some guy?  I saw him.”  They didn’t seem too interested in chatting.  I just watched, and gathered that the girl didn’t want the two men to know she was the person who called the police.  I did witness some of what happened though, and if I could put a word in to get the kid with the afro in more trouble for breaking my kitty ladder, then by all means, I wanted justice.

I approached the staircase and heard something.  Huh??  “My cat wants me,” I said as I snuck past the huddle of cops on the stairs.  Did I let one of the cats out??  Prince Loren was sitting on the stairs past our door and was demanding that I let him back in our apartment.  I walked back in and talked with Heejung about the kitty ladder and basked in my anger.  Max sat by the front door and meowed.  The irony of the ladder being broken the same day we got it could have possibly been humorous to me.  That’s not what I was mad about.  The punk with the afro just broke my kitty ladder and acted like nothing had happened- didn’t even mention it to me.

Life went on for thirty minutes or more but I couldn’t get my mind off the kitty ladder and what I wanted to say to the afro boy.  Eventually we started hearing thuds on the floor upstairs and that’s when I decided to walk outside and wait for my chance to approach him.  I chatted with the downstairs lady who always goes out, smokes and talks with all the neighbors.  I used some choice words explaining what happened with our kitty ladder and was kind of jittery because I was so upset.

Finally, the third story apartment door opened and out came the white guy who was visiting from out of state in handcuffs, escorted by a policeman.  Next, some more policemen and perfect! the kid with the afro.  The two kids looked like it was just another day in the park and they waltzed down the stairs handcuffed.  The white guy walked past and told the downstairs lady to “call my girlfriend and let her know I’m in jail”.  Little did he know, his “girlfriend” was the one who called the police.  He was visiting the new girl on the 3rd floor, they were both from Texas.  He was overstaying his visit and had called the 3rd story girl to tell her that he was bringing a brick of weed over.  That was one of her rules, that he wouldn’t bring any drugs, but she couldn’t dissuade him from bringing it to her apartment and had tried to find excuses (all over the phone while she had been at work) to avoid coming home.  She ended up calling the police because she felt uncomfortable with the idea of two guys (one of which she didn’t know) smoking weed in her apartment.

Next the kid with the afro walked past.  I walked up from behind.  “Hey, you broke something of mine.”  “Oh, I did?”  All the policemen’s faces turned towards me.  “What did he break?” “Well, it was a, I was…”  I cut the kid off and started talking about my poor kitty ladder.  One of the policemen followed me with a pen and notepad.  “He just stepped on my cat ladder and broke it trying to climb up to the third story balcony”  “He was doing things he shouldn’t have been doing.  How much was it worth?”  “Nothing it was just made out of scratch.”  “Well, you have to give me a price if you want to press charges”  “No, I don’t want to press charges, it’s just that he acted like he didn’t do anything…”  I said that loud enough for the kid to hear me.  “It’s ok, he’s going to jail for lots of things.”  And the policemen and everybody walked away.  Later I walked outside to talk with the upstairs girl and the smoker couple downstairs.

Those kids could have been somewhere else not intruding in anybody elses’  lives if they hadn’t been so stupid.  Instead they were on their way to jail.  If you want to do something illegal and wrong, don’t do it.  If you want to do something illegal and controversial, at least be smart about it.  And don’t break my kitty ladder.