Investing General Discussion

Big Phoenix said:

So between SNDL and now UAL, ive missed out on close to 100k in profit this year. Real easy to see why people go off the deep end with trading and blow themselves up.

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Don't do that. I had 60k in BTNX at 50 and a year later it went to 400. At the time, no one was saying it would go much higher. So yeah, would have had 500k if I'd sat on it for a year.

You'll go crazy thinking about trades you didn't make, or ended early. Literally, they'll be taking sizes for your straight jacket.

When you motherfuckers get a time machine, I need to borrow it just a few minutes.

Sanrith Descartes said:

They had been on sale the last 3-4 weeks but many have bounced back. Depends on the specific stock and sector to be honest. Some are still decently discounted. Just remember they are boomer stocks and don't tend to move a lot. I like them as a hedge against my tech heavy portfolio.

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It might be worth it, especially since they haven't got the insane run up the travel and leisure stocks did.

I netted 13.1% on my day trades in September, had five losing days, the rest winners. I day traded every day but two days (I swing traded the travel stocks and cashed some of them in yesterday). Three of the losers were really small (a few hundred) when everything was choppy. That's bound to happen. Two of the days, I jumped confirmation or chased a stock price too far. So 40% of my losses came from mental errors. So my bad days (where I'm at fault) are literally all stemming from FOMO. The other 60 was trading TSLA, and that stock freaks me out, because they are so irrational on that.

I can live off of 4% a month from my day trades.

I also started doing trades with up to 100k at once. I thought I'd shit my pants, but I did the simulator on a million dollars, and that desensitized me.

We'll see what the future brings. The more I trust myself, the more money I'll put in. I'm not trying to make 13% a month, its 4. I'm not going to pressure myself to try to keep that level of gains up. Its all about the next trade, not trying to live up to a number. My wife just told me today that she expects my trades to be our sole income maker NOW. She sees the numbers. But I know the mental errors I made a few months ago, and I know that my brain wants to go back to that. Like, I argue with myself when I trade. There's the disciplined guy, and then there's the revenge trader guy that wants to make the stock pay for every penny. I am not ready to spend any money out of the account, its best to just roll back in any gains.

I made roughly 8k on day trades on Friday, but I don't want to get overconfident. I also haven't sold 15% of that, but thats another story. Technical analysis is a such a small part to this, I have to keep my brain emotion free and focused. Self mastery is far more important.

August I barely netted 2%, but I was solely trading AMD, and that became a MEME stock. They'd alternate between pushing it and dropping it. TA was very hard, it got so choppy. First half of this month was TSLA, second half was JETS, QQQ and SPY.

Big Phoenix said:

Haha I didn't mean harm myself,I meant start making bad trades and lose their money and end up posting loss porn on web.

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OK, just don't commit suicide. I'm sure you have people that love you.

Blazin said:

So you're planning on pulling in 60% return a year? (4% monthly compounded is a net 60% return by month 12 on the original amount, ie 60% YoY). Or do you not roll the gains, and pull them out for expenses?)

If so are you planning on pulling in 48% return a year?

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I don't have any goals other than the next trade, and to be consistent in the next 30 days. 13.1% was great last month, but actually started to feel the pressure of doing that every day. I can easily make 4% a month if I keep my mind clear.

I'm not increasing my trades as the balance goes up. I take the extra money, and either let the balance build, or put money into a swing or long term investment. No money is coming out for expenses. I don't need the money, I have a business that pays me well. This is just a means of getting another source of income, but mainly for the challenge of succeeding where most people fail or do poorly at.

Whoosh, it went right over his head Blazin .

Blazin said:

How many trades for the month to day trade a 13%? Swing trading I average about 25 trades a month, can be as low as 5.

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I am scalping most of the time, so more trades than most. Anywhere from 5 to 30 trades in a day. I plug in my OCO bracket orders for programmed profits, and if I think it will run, I open the profit up some.

Honestly, I do better with 5-8 trades a day. I can't tell you how many times I made 1% in 15 minutes, just to give half of that back in the next hour. Me being the type A personality thinks more is better. If I can make 1% in 15 minutes, I can make 3 in an hour, right? It hasn't worked that way for me.

Zzen said:

Whoosh, it went right over his head Blazin .

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Zzen, I'm really just too old for any sort of forum games. Leave me out of them.

Shonuff said:

Zzen, I'm really just too old for any sort of forum games. Leave me out of them.

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I think he's trying to say your success is a product of an irrational bull market where it's hard not to make money. That the gains you're making are not sustainable.

You wouldn't be the first person to make a ton of money day trading and think you can consistently make obscene amounts of money. The reality is you're going to have a bad beat at some point. Likely enough to wipe out everything you've made so far.

Gravel said:

I think he's trying to say your success is a product of an irrational bull market where it's hard not to make money. That the gains you're making are not sustainable.

You wouldn't be the first person to make a ton of money day trading and think you can consistently make obscene amounts of money. The reality is you're going to have a bad beat at some point. Likely enough to wipe out everything you've made so far.

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Bulls get fed, bears get fed, I am both. You see my gains I post them daily now. When the market is bearish, I've been shorting the SPY and QQQ as they've been bleeding the last few weeks. I shorted MRNA on Friday and made a couple of thousand in a little over an hour, I shorted Zoom. Not sure what the argument is. I have learned to be fluid on my trades. Up, down, I try to move with the confirmation, unless my gut tells me the market is flat out wrong.

Go back, re-read my post. I already said, 13% is not sustainable. If I'm making .2% a day, I'm happy, and I seem to be able to do that easily. The market is a humbling place, so I'll keep my mouth shut and we'll see how I've done after a solid year of day trading, which will be Feb 1 of next year.

Wipe out everything I've made so far? Hell no. I've studied on risk management, and at no point in time am I risking even .05% of my total portfolio on a day trade. Only beginner traders do things that will wipe out everything they've made so far. I learned the hard way in Feb, Mar and Apr about risk management. Best thing to do, I've learned, is to walk away on the bad days, and I stop loss based on volatility. If I get stopped out, I survey the land and see what the hell happened. I used to try to get revenge and hit home runs, which made for worse losses on my bad days. Now I lose $200 for the day. I posted every day last week, Monday was 1,200, Tuesday was -319, Wednesday was 16, Thursday was -159 and Friday was 1,870. In Feb, Mar and Apr, if I had a loser day, its because I'd have some sort of mental default. I'd give up 40% of my weekly gains on a loser day, now its like 10. Now, I just walk away, come back, review the tape, and see what I could've done better. Instead of losing 1,500 on a loser day, its 300 max now. Anybody can make gains with a good trading system (and I think mine is OK), but its how you handle the losers.

I exercise restraint, I review my errors and my wins. Because when I sit back and see the error, I realize it was a stupid mistake that should never have been made.

Everything is in the log for me to study and try to improve upon.

Gravel said:

I think he's trying to say your success is a product of an irrational bull market where it's hard not to make money. That the gains you're making are not sustainable.

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I expected to make more than 13%, and told everyone my gameplan a month ago. Go back, look at my post history. I gave the reasoning behind those trades a month ago, right here. A large percentage of my gains came from travel and leisure. Was I expecting Merck to do their drug? No. But I've posted data on covid counts for awhile, saying that the travel and leisure stocks were too beat up based on covid counts. I recall posting here that the technicals were absolute garbage, but it would be a good trade if you can stomach it. And I posted the companies I was buying. I said these companies would be out of favor for awhile, but that they'd be in favor before the end of October. On the companies with Chinese exposure, I cut and ran when the Chinese government got involved (reentering WYNN at 80). 95% of my swings went into American companies, and 5 into China. And like I said, when technicals went from garbage to good, I took profits, and then start day trading them (long or short, it didn't matter). I pretty much flipped JETS the last two weeks of the month, but I'd back in it by the end of the day or premarket.

I did not think I would see those gains for another month. And as the companies got stronger, I alternated between swing and day trades. But I fully expected to make 20% by the end of October.

I stand behind what I said. If you are nimble enough in the coming week on these, you'll make a killing. Look at the chart on JETS on Friday. Notice I said the word NIMBLE. I've netted 5% already in the first day of October on the travel and leisure stocks. I'll look to short when people take profits, get back on the wagon when things start moving upstream. I actually didn't short these on Friday, but I will as these companies start getting up there again.

These are not companies I'm holding long term, they have too many balance sheet issues, they diluted too much and took on debt. I don't want to be around for any of them on earnings except for WYNN.

Blazin said:

So, that's a yes. Quite an impressive number, that it sounds like you are going to beat more often than not. Based on your posts it seems you are trading with around 100-200k at the moment. Given you're pace you'll have grown that to $13.7M at a minimum within a decade, the second decade is where it will get a lot more exciting as you'll cruise to $1.5B by then. I could never make 4% a month consistently, nice work. Going to be cool seeing the journey.

Do you think you'll ditch the business at some point or sell to have more cash to work with? I always tracked cash utilization each month and just slowly over time increased the amount I was trading with then just let the portfolio growth handle increasing trade size.

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The only future points I'm thinking about are the next trade, and February of 2022. Short term, its trying to make 200-500 a day this month. Next year, that's when I reevaluate how much more money I move from the business to me.

Its not good money management for me to have six months' working capital sitting in the business account. The business is paid off. I've had more than one CPA tell me because of my C corp structure, if I pull the money out, I will be taxed 15%. So he feels the best thing to do is to loan the money from the business and then pay it back.

I don't think I'll need the business when I have one million to trade with, along with my other investments I have. And that's doable, given I've had months of netting 40k multiple times this year in it.

End of the day, most business owners pull out every penny. I'm 50 now, and I've put every penny I had into the company to make it better and reduce costs. When I was a Business Consultant in my other life, most business owners kept so little cash in their companies you wonder how they kept the lights on. We've done the opposite, but at age 50, I have to start pulling money out and making it work.

I killed my 401k to do the business in my 30s, and would have had 500k sitting in it by now. That money (and more) has to come out. Between the six months of working capital and a 200k settlement on the way (long story), eventually that's coming out in the next year or two and into my trading account. And then I'll let my trading account build on its own, and move retained earnings out.

Long story short, I'll be working up to trading 500k soon, as long as I can prove to myself I can be consistent. The ability to make trading profits doesn't come from your computer, it comes from your brain. 80% of the time when I'm losing, its me breaking my trading system and my rules. I look at my logs since February, my losses came from:

1- I was too slow to pull the trigger
2- didn't wait for confirmation, my mind played tricks on me
3- chased the stock (FOMO)
4- didn't obey the stop loss

Any of those four are what cause me to lose. Its not a market thing, or a trading system thing, its a me thing. When I look at my logs, I've gotten better in all of those. Two times I didn't take the stop. I got crushed on Tesla buying it one day, so I held it. The next day, it roared back at the open double what I lost. And I didn't have a stop loss on JETS, when it fell a few percent, because I thought the market got it wrong. I was right, the market decided covid was over.

Me chasing FOMO is still an issue, often times, I chase a long or short position, can't catch it, keep upping my bid, and then when I catch it, the signal reverses hard. I don't do that as much, I am leery and patient. As long as I avoid those mistakes, I can easily make .35%+ a day on average.

The journey is exciting, as I get to do something new. Business is in harvest mode, this is a new challenge. I get to see what type of trader I am. One that can reach in the market and take money at will, or one that is mediocre. I think I'm the former, but I could be the latter. February 2022 will be a good test, that will be one year of doing it seriously.

Most of what I do is scalping, and last time I've had stretches where I was 92.3% correct. Scalping is my thing. Last time I kept my trades in order and tracked them, 72 of 78 trades were winners.