I’ve been having some issues here at home today. Our network in the house went down after the close of trading. Then Cable One internet went down after I got the network working. I thought I had done something to the internet and wasted an hour shutting things down and rebooting the system.
We are hosting our neighborhood Christmas party tomorrow night and we have been putting the finishing touches on the house cleaning and decorating as well.
So, I’ve been running in circles tonight.
I didn’t get my watch list done last night because I fell asleep on the couch. Seriously. I started a fire, curled up with the wife and fell asleep for a few. After I woke up, I knew I wouldn’t be able to do a watch list and just bagged it. There is so much time spent doing this that I think it sort of caught up with me last night. I don’t understand how Tim Sykes, Michael Goode, etc do this full-time everyday. I was beat last night.
What I’m saying is I am not doing a watch list tonight or tomorrow night. I just don’t have the time tonight and will never find the time tomorrow with the party. I will post a trade recap for the week after the close on Friday. I’ve been writing it as I go along this week.
My dumbest trade of the last two weeks occurred yesterday and so far I’ve been lucky as it is holding steady. I’ll recap that one. I also sold LZB this morning. It really looked like it might break through $11.00 with strength yesterday so I held it. When it failed late yesterday and didn’t really spike this morning I got out at $11.05ish. That, clearly, has been my best trade so far. Especially after the way it finished this evening. FNM and FRE are both a close second place. I spotted both of those on my own and made decent profits on both. I’m still losing more than I’m winning though.
I filled out my Cy Group application and spoke with Stan in the chat at IU on Monday and Steve at Cy Group on the phone today for about an hour with questions about the technicalities of the platform and questions about the application. He had great patience with me and was able to answer all my questions. I’ll try to get out a post about that over the weekend as well.
I have been spending all my days this week in IU’s chat. Learning a lot and missing a lot. Missing trades because I’m a little gun-shy. Today, I actually had my trade ready for DCGN when it was alerted in chat. I had a limit order ready at $.105 when the ask was at $.1035 before it took off to $.30. I just couldn’t pull the trigger because I had two other trades running and, quite frankly, I was scared to do it. You always here people say, “Keep the emotion out of it” and I can not tell you how hard that really is to do when it’s your limited money on the line.
Anyway, that’s where things are right now. I haven’t counted my money, like the song says, but I know I’m still in the red.
The Donger Trades 
December 17, 2009 at 10:21
Hi,
I’m also part of IU … why not try paper trading with toss free demo, doing one trade at a time this way you’re not frantic, you’ll gain confidence … with IU, start with their alerts that are $1 and up (much, much less risk of losing a huge amt of $), chart them when the alert is given, watch them, and if you like then go long or short … if you choose to do the paper trade set it to only the real amount of money you’ll be using, this will make it more realistic … and as your confidence and skill develop you can move onto multiple trade at the same time and on to the real pennies if you wish …
This Really helped me … Hope it helps you 🙂
December 17, 2009 at 10:55
One at a time. I see. That way even with the delayed quotes at least I can recreate the trade accurately. I’ll give that shot. Thanks for the advice. What is your name in IU?
December 17, 2009 at 12:46
My user id there is TinkertBells … I have to change it to TraderGirl as I’ve been having problems with the TinkertBells email acct. My heart beats like a mile a min when I do multiple trades (I’m a Super Newbie) so I decided to do one trade at a time and it’s been working super for Meee 🙂
December 18, 2009 at 07:49
I’m have a demo acct on Think or Swim that I use for charting and I have Real Time quotes.
Try this…click the setup button (on mine it is near the top
leftright corner). On the “general tab” (first tab) in the right corner, there is a field “Quote Speed”…you should be able to select “REAL-TIME – no delay”.If this doesn’t work…try chatting with support. They showed me how about a year ago.
December 18, 2009 at 09:12
I took your second comment and corrected it into this comment.
I did chat with support and they told me they do not offer real time quotes in paper trades. I had “Real Time – no delay” selected as well. Maybe things changed recently, I don’t know. They told me that since real time quotes cost them money, they do not offer it in the paper trading option.
December 18, 2009 at 16:16
ahhh that’s sucks … I still have a real acct with them thou I withdrew almost all the funds but left a few dollars… maybe that’s why my real time worked…
December 18, 2009 at 19:22
My real time works in my brokerage account in TD Ameritrade just fine. So I was using that data stream to track the stocks each day, but noticed the delay under TOS when it was logged into the paper trade option. When I’m logged into my regular account everything is good in TOS, just not in the paper trade option. I’ll play around with it some more next week. Maybe I still am doing something wrong.