sfsamperi.blogspot.com

You have to survive

You have to survive
Every day is a battle, survival is rule #1

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

mixed day. ADSK and COL got stopped out after only 2 days. DBO and DBC had a large pullback but they are mutual funds and im thinking i should avoid them cuz even though they cover different things they have the exact same charts, which means they have the exact same buyers and sellers. so its like im betting double on the same buyers or sellers for no reason, kinda risky. CVH, EL and NFLX all look good right now. Nothing looked anywhere near good enough to enter with low volume and many dojis today.

i think i just need more time/trades to really see how the MA's could help prevent pullbacks for me.

when the MA's are close it allows price to puncture them easily.....but this works the other way around too so its not really helping my odds at all to prevent an immediate pullback after entry. looks like im still just as likely to get stopped out. the MTF MA's really wouldnt start preventing pullbacks until price has moved in the right direction for anyways but that happens at some point in every good trade so thats already covered. i need to figure out how the MA's should look to prevent an immediate stop out. i think going back to entering with MA's farther apart but only adding a requirement of price closing past the farthest MA on entry....hmmm...

Monday, August 30, 2010

No stop outs today, overall a good day of gains. A few stocks are pulling back to MA's so hopefully they will do their job and hold up. My other trades are moving solidly in the right direction. I like the watchlist that i have but there was very little volume overall so nothing looked good for entry.

Friday, August 27, 2010

ADSK, COL, DBC, DBO long entries

I entered these four beauties right before the close today...all longs too.






I also had CHRW and COST (darn i liked this one) exit at their break-even stops. Turns out that COST didnt even have a large enough channel range for me so maybe its jump in volatility couldnt be handled by the small channel.
I started thinking after looking at my COST trade and i think i should start TRYING to use the next TL as a target instead of just a general area where ill assume my trailing stop will occur. It should be my official target and if it ever gets touched i will exit. My trailing stop should be the safety net, not my main form of exiting.
I have also decided that the volume of prior bars to entry bars in a bar signal are virtually meaningless. I have skipped trades based on prior bars' volume and now i think that was really stupid. All that matters is for my entry bar to have nice volume.
time for some World Soccer on NES



Thursday, August 26, 2010

Nothing to enter from my watchlist, i think it got stale early this week.

Exited two trades. AKR was a small 4.2% gain and APKT was a "large" 4.3% loss. I think i AKR would have been better with the MA's out of the way. APKT probably just robbed me but oh well. Break even day as far as my ratios go....



couldnt sleep yet so i made these bad boys

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Wanted to exit my AKR trade but internet wasnt working so ill have to get out with a market order in the morning. really annoying. i wish i could find internet that never gives me this problem.

Nothing quite good enough to enter for today.

I moved CHRW to break even.
I also moved COST to break even after its first day since it really took off. Its an early but good testament to my new MA requirement. The best three moves i have been in lately are also the only three that pass my MA requirement. The most recent two were on purpose.....im smart huh?

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

COST long entry

Entered Cost for a long. I wasnt quite sure where i should put my stop loss since i am using my new MA requirements. I ended up putting it far enough behind entry where i should only have a 1:2.5 risk to reward but i really like the charts for this one.
I moved CVH and NFLX to break even. Overall a great day of gains with no stop outs. My experimental EDU trade looks to have been wrong but im holding another 7 trades using my rules. looking good and i even published another page on my blog just for potential improvements that i might want to add after this MA stuff.

Monday, August 23, 2010

APKT short entry

Entered APKT for a short. It had a crazy cloud cover pattern and closed past all MA's. i'd really like to see how well it drops....I also like AVP for a long trade but its MTF 20 MA was in the way so i skipped it.
Flipping through 80 charts (40 pages) while looking for volume seems to be a good amount for me.

Solid profit gaining day with no stop outs. Most of my current trades had entries well past MTF MA's but are doing good so far anyways. My trades from now on will be entered inside MTF MA's for better probability. Probability gets you in the limo....


Friday, August 20, 2010

got stopped out of IR, it slowly turned to crap the second i bought it. normal loss.

watchlist is stale, saw nothing that i wanted to enter. found a few to check on but they all looked horrible upon closer inspection. honestly i just trashed the second half of my watchlist. im looking forward to my research for this weekend using intertwined daily MA's.

i made a powerpoint version of my Hunting Bulls and Bears trading packet and i have been playing DayTrading on facebook. i do pretty good on that game and i think its based on real days.....it appears to only be charging about $1.50 per commission. Im sure some newbies wont realize that and open a Scottrade account right away!! All i do is enter at what looks like a s/r area and exit at the other end. fun for me.

Thursday, August 19, 2010

I have a good amount of stocks to flip through before entry but the watchlist is getting stale. No new entries today. Overall a decent day of gains. Next week's watchlist will require stocks that have daily MA's intertwined and ready to be broken through. im looking forward to see how that pans out. Currently holding 7 trades including the experimental wedge play.


Wednesday, August 18, 2010

overall the trades im holding are looking like a mixed bag. I was stopped out of FAST, MMM and TSL today. small losses but still proportional to range. What im still holding either looks really good or has a decent chance right now. Nothing at all looked interesting to enter today, volume was dead across the ticker.



I think i will start requiring my daily MA's to be very close, preferably intertwined, while scanning for setups so that i can find the stocks who close past the daily MA's on the entry bar....... just like WHAT I ALREADY REQUIRE for my hourly chart. I think this could be the extra oomph that i was looking for. It makes sense and i already like doing it with my other time frame. The best thing about doing this is price wont get stuck bouncing around, wasting time in between the 20 and 50 which i see in many of my trades. Today i realized that closing past the daily 20 is good, but then you have the 50 MA which acts like a brick wall half the time. Instead price will be pushed in the trade direction easier with S/R behind it and there will be a clear path in front until the next TL is hit. I can look for daily MA's being really close and intertwined along with TL's on the print outs. This is also good cuz it will make my research last longer since i had been going through it a little quicker latley.


step 1 : (scan) general volume and price


step 2: overbought/oversold stochastics (making printouts)


step 3: TL's and intertwined MA's


step 4: Volume (filtering after 2pm)


step 5: Bar signal and entry checklist (right before the close)



I will also reject any trades whose 'proportional stop-loss'doesnt reach back behind the entry bar but this should only make me skip a few. I have been doing plenty of research and i think i improved that aspect well enough for now. I see that my probability is at 34% this second so i need to look for my next improvement and maybe the daily close past 20/50 MA's will be steroids for my ratios. My improved research is giving me many trades but its too many, so i need to weed out some.


I still need to add my double gap-thrust bar signal to my arsenal and i could go ahead and type out my current trading packet to go ahead and get that saved on my flashdrive.

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

FAST, MMM, IR, NFLX entries

My EWZ short trade closed just under my stop loss yesterday afternoon, then gapped around it for today which gave me a bigger loss than i want but thats trading life. this was the trade i found 'accidentally' while looking for entries.

I entered FAST, MMM and IR for longs as well as NFLX for a short today. The sudden switch to mostly long opportunities is interesting. Going into tomorrow i will be holding 9 trades plus the EDU experimental trade which i think is a new record for me. Good day expecially since i didnt have time to do anything yesterday cuz i was stuck at Brake Check for too long and spent $430. Good thing since yesterday was mainly a pullback which means i probably wouldnt have entered anything anyways. Uh oh, time to go!






another illustration:


i like to eat chocolate while looking for possible entries before the close, btw

Monday, August 16, 2010

This one took me awhile to throw together but its ok cuz im a solid supporter of OHLC bars and really dislike candlesticks.



just bought 20 NES games and i will probably keep around 9 of them including a fairly rare one called bucky o'hare which im basically getting for a couple dollars but its usually sold for $15 on ebay. time for bed.

Sunday, August 15, 2010

just playing around. i like to make simple drawings of important concepts. here are a couple.

Friday, August 13, 2010

Its Friday the 13th. Good things happen to me on this day. YAY!

I moved TSL stoploss to break even since it closed past 50 MA. I moved EL stoploss to break even since it closed past the same distance as stoploss, past entry.

I have a small watchlist right now but i did find one nice looking short entry for EE, EL PASO. But it wasnt available to borrow for shorting. Its avg volume was 355k shares...

overall a quiet yet solid day of gains. only a couple stocks havent been moved to break even yet. i will do plenty of research this weekend for next week and maybe i can break my record by holding more than 8 trades at once! i might as well since im using play money.

time for some robo baseball on NES.

Thursday, August 12, 2010

much quieter today than yesterday for me. Basically a good down day. About to move several more of my trades to break even if i get one more good down day. Found nothing new to enter. Probably cuz my watchlist is getting stale. Need to do more research. i did finish typing out my book notes earlier. At 33 pages so far. I will add stuff if i happen to think of anything but it covers nearly everything i would want to talk about that has happened to me up to now.

time for some NES Tennis on level 3 difficulty...

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

CVH, EL, EWZ short entries

ok...busy trading day for me. got a big ole long blog post today...

Literally going until the closing bell, i entered CVH, EL and EWZ for short trades.
EWZ had an en garde signal, CVH had a snake bite signal but im not totally sure what to classify EL's signal yet. I looks like a signal i thought about using before but i rarely saw it. two gaps in the same direction surrounding a small bar, follwed by a strong sell off. the logic behind using this as a signal would be that the first gap is the initial sell-off, then the second gap confirms that direction, then the strong selloff really destroys the buyer's spirit. two gaps shows how it wasnt just a one day event.

I also wanted EE but it wasnt available to BORROW! I guess its volume was pretty low so i probably should raise my volume requirement instead or in addition to my price requirement for scanning. but the really wierd part about today was while i was trying to check the EL chart, i accidentally typed in EWZ...I havent seen EWZ's chart in a very long time and its not on my watch list but for some reason while typing quickly i hit E-W-Z instead of E-L. Even though i typed it on accident, the chart look damn near perfect for a short entry so after checking it a 2nd time to make sure i wasnt confused, i entered it within a minute of the bell.




I have moved the AKR stop down to break-even and am now holding 7 trades including my experiemental EDU wedge short whose results i wont include in my ratios.

I realized that a recent CL stop out i had turned out to be great. I got robbed but at least i was on the right track.


Its official. My watchlists really turn to crap within a week. I wanted to make sure so i studied it again. I checked my research 8 and 9 printouts and after 2 days go by the potential really starts dropping. Looking back i see several moves that took off well but had no signal, thus why i never entered. But i would be making a newbie error by now trying to get into them. Those moves are moves i'll never touch. To get into those i would have to also get into many many losers as well. Not worth it. Most of research 8 was crap after a week and i checked research 9 which after only 3 days appeared to already be 25% crap. PLust there ar the charts i originally X-ed out. So in other words, after 3 days the first 30 charts that i printed out have dwindled to only 15 that still have potential. So in 2 more days, which would be a full week for research 9, there should be well under 50% of the charts that still have potential plays. This is why its really worth my time to just start over with 100% potential each week by doing new research. I have been doing about 3 research sessions a week.

Tuesday, August 10, 2010

CHRW short entry, EDU short experimental entry, GRYE long entry with scottrade

I went short in CHRW according to my current set of rules. I also shorted EDU as a curious trade. an experiment. it seems to be how daytrader rockstar shorts rising wedges so i thought i would try it. My order to buy 6000 shares of GRYE penny stock in Scottrade was filled today at .005 and i immediately lost 20%, i lost half of a cent....crazy! I plan on holding GRYE for long enough to let it do a rediculous pump or mature into a higher price range. I might put some more money into GRYE soon, maybe get it up to 20000 shares. It does seem like a great little company where the stock price only sucks cuz they are growing so rapidly and their financial appear terrible as a result.



yesterday i found one stock i wanted to short but it wasnt available to borrow...CHBT. im getting a little tired of hearing that from good charts that i find. will probably focus on more expensive stocks from now on. i also saw "stop trading" with big jim cramer and a good looking brunette. i would say there was about 30% talk about 'finance' and 70% joking around. thanks CNBC for keeping the cattle interested enough to fuel the market fire.

this china bubble sounds like its going to burst any day, to the suprise of most people there im sure. seems so obvious. you really know what a market is topping out if people in high places start telling the public that "its not topping out".

today news got out that possibly 15000 people have died from a Russian heat wave. thats a pretty high number which makes Russia sound more like a 3rd world country...i expected more from proud russia, now going on 20 years without communism.

Sunday, August 8, 2010

Finished reading "An American Hedge Fund". Pretty good book about how Tim Sykes became a wealthy trader.

Friday, August 6, 2010

Another quiet day for me.

I did adjust my stop loss to make it bigger for my TSL trade. I thought i should go ahead and apply my new stop loss rules to this trade since it has so much potential for reward. It pulled back against me today but it still has a chance. Id rather make sure i took a slightly bigger loss with this trade than to watch it get stopped out and then take off for a large profit.

AKR gapped down and created a hammer in between the MA's, but thats fine cuz its still a nice % gain today.

holding TSL and AKR shorts into the weekend.

Thursday, August 5, 2010

Didnt see anything good at all to enter today. Exited BPI with a target exit, giving me a 10.3% gain. Quiet day for me and the market. Only holding TSL and AKR going into tomorrow

I want to get into more trades now that i am adjusting my stop loss LIKE I SHOULD now, captain Stephen F. Samperi.....signing off
Berlesconi, the leader of Italia is on trial for tax evasion. He says he's innocent but he understands why people might evade paying taxes when the government wants 50-60% of their income. Its a part of the culture their to evade taxes if you can. Does anyone disagree with this guy? Who would want to pay that much? Virtually everyone can rationalize skimming 20% off your taxes so that you 'only' pay 30-40%. Maybe if everyone there is attempting to crack down on tax evasion since most of europe has a rediculous amount of debt, they might become more capitalistic to lower their taxes. Something's gotta give.... Here people complain about high taxes, europeans complain about really high taxes. Seems so obvious a large fraction of europeans would want to be capitalists but it never happens. The continent just keeps growing slower than everyone else. Their EU-stint is riddled with inefficiency and arguements. It only recently got big enough to merely cover half of europe and they seem to barely handle this 'big recession' at their current size. Some parts are lowering in population which would help some but overpopulation is not the problem there. Over-taxation is the problem cuz people have little motivaiton to create and work more. Considering all this and the fact that our country purposely keeps the dollar a little weak means european companies make even less money from selling their precious "benzes and land rovers" as well as spending more on ads for their Tresemme and parfumes. Something's gotta give eventually. We are basically steadily conquering the socialistic pride of europe so i think eventually they will be more like us and then everyone would make more money. Cuba should turn into a capitalistic vacation paradise once castro's brother dies off. North Korea should gradually turn into another hong kong/canton area if they had any sense but that one's iffy. UAE is an attempt at building up the middle east but i just see lots of money wasted on stuff 'out in the middle of nowhere' for the super rich. Those are some of my thoughts of the current world, then end.

Wednesday, August 4, 2010

as the 2nd post i am making for today, i just want to say that i think it would be fun to buy a bunch of really really cheap penny stocks and have their certificates. i was going to do it with my old Scottrade account since i still have it and i noticed now they have $7 trades with a $500 deposit required....gettin greedy. I didnt want to use my TOS account since these trades would have nothing to do with my normal trading and i dont want the account fluctuating based on the penny stocks. I almost had to use TOS just to find stocks cuz i hadnt used Scottrade's website in so long, its the dorky/not user friendly/crowded design that so many discount brokers have. thinking about putting $50 towards thousands and thousands of shares of various penny stocks :P and i want to keep the certificates, maybe use them as decoration one day or something.

it could be my lifelong experiment showing how a few dollars in a bunch of penny stocks, if held for a long time could result in some home runs that would make it interestingly profitable.
stopped out of SPN today for a 3.1% loss. even if the stop was bigger for this trade which now i think i should have done, it still would have gotten stopped out but i still see the difference it could make. overall a good day of decent gains.

i had been thinking about something i could do to improve my trades since my probability is a little anemic lately. Market timing still doesnt make sense to me but i realized my stop losses werent always the size they should have been. I had been making sure my losses dont exceed 3%, but that doesnt have to apply to every single trade, just for overall account losses. So as long as i dont put 100% of my capital into any one trade then i can let trades have 4 or 5% stop losses and it wont matter. Bigger stops would be used for bigger gains, it would all even out in the long run. I had some good-looking trades that i skipped just cuz the range(reward) wasnt big enough since i was "requiring 20% range". Now i will still try to use them as long as i lower my risk proportionately. I was also getting stopped out of good-looking trades at the beginning since my stop wasnt big enough. I was giving all my trades a 3% stop loss but for me, that should only apply to a channel with a range of 21%. The flip side would be when i had stops that were way too big for a smaller range, such as one with only 10% range, and i had to subjectively lower the stop just cuz it looked so funny that i knew it wasnt right. The stop loss is my risk and the range is my reward. So this is all apart of my risk to reward stuff. So now i will make sure my stops are the appropriate size in relation to the range.

Also i will completely start over with new research every week since after a week, most of my watchlist turns to crap anyways. Really no point in me filtering through a bunch of crappy charts just to keep some that still look ok when i could just do a bunch of new research really quick. When i flip through my watchlist before the close every day looking for volume, i want everything to still have potential.

risk to reward that i want is 1:7

RISK % : RANGE %
5 : 35
4.5 : 32
4 : 28
3.5 : 25
3 : 21
2.5 : 18
2 : 14
1.5 : 11
1 : 7

Tuesday, August 3, 2010

BPI and AKR short entries

stopped out of WLP today for a 2.9% loss. not surpised since everything i held had been barely hanging in there.


TSL and SPN are still staying below their stop losses, so thanks guys! thanks for sticking in with me! u both are huckleberries. there will definitely be a large injection into my watchlist today and hopefully a couple entries before the close.

For awhile now i have noticed that my gains and losses come in strings. my strings of gains seem to come when they happen to be going with the market while my strings of losses, such as right now, happen to be going against the market. last night i was trying to figure out something that i could improve, either with price action leading up to the reversals or maybe some other indicator. but one thing i have never done was time my trades with the market, like the S&P 500 index or SPY. My ratios right now seem to highlight how i might have bad timing. My average gain is very large, my average loss quite small. So the trades are good. But my probability is fairly low and struggling to stay around 50%. hmmmmmm. i was thinking i could look to sell when SPY is overbought on daily and hourly charts at the same time. Seems like a good way to use a general signal such as stochastics being overbought cuz then under that general signal i could scan and filter for specific stocks. I thought about timing trades with the market long before but i never completely understood the rational for it and wasnt quite sure how to go about it. I think i get it now. I should be used to this process of learning by now, i've figured out several things this way. And if it works then i should basically have more string of gains than strings of losses which would change my ratios drastically for the better.

Entered AKR and BPI. I would prefer AKR to have had an even bigger bar signal and if BPI had an even bigger channel range, but i wanted to get into them. SPY is overbought on daily and hourly so im curious. I have been relaxed about skipping trades where the stop loss cannot be placed well past bar signal and still stay under 3% loss. I wanted to see if it would hurt me or not if i forgot about it cuz for a little while it seemed to keep me from getting into some otherwise great looking trades....

Monday, August 2, 2010

i was busy with chores today. didnt even check my position until 10 minutes before the close. basically a bad day. i was stopped out of 3 more of my short trades while the remaining 3 are barely hanging in there. Stopped out of TEX for a 4.1% loss, high than i want since price gapped past my stop loss. Stopped out of ANR for a 3.4% loss, not too bad since it was a strong up day. Stopped out of DELL for a 3.1% loss. loss sizes are acceptable since the day went strongly the other way. if todays's reasoning/news for bullishness was just bs then there will probably be some gaps down for tomorrow morning. i'll see.

busy setting up another printer and organizing some notes i had been writing. first printer broke after two weeks. i need a printer. so no time to filter through any charts looking for entries. i will try to print out more stock charts if i have time. this printer sure is taking a long time to upload a bunch of software i dont even want...

need to get into some nice trades now to help even out the ratios.