AXP Archives | BMore Trader

Spreadsheet Day 2

With what I learned yesterday, I was a little more prepared today to enter orders from the spreadsheet. I had already pared the list of targets down and chose to enter orders manually as quickly as I could for the targets that fired first. I ended up placing trades in XLV, HD, AXP, XLU, and JNJ. It was hectic transferring the entry orders and position sizes manually from the spreadsheet because the market was moving quickly. Here are the charts of the trades:

While I feel there is definitely room for improvement in what I managed to do today, the results (+2.25R) for the 6 trades were certainly acceptable. I may be stretching my span of control by following so many possible targets, but as long as I am paper trading this idea, I will continue to enter as many as I can manage so that I can look for other qualities to screen on the spreadsheets to help give me another edge.

Swing Trades

No swing trades were opened today. The double position in CAT was stopped out as well as OKTA. Net for the three positions was -1.51R. when combined with the day trades above, that gives me +.75R for the day.

Long: AWK, CVX, FCX, GIS, JPM, MKC, RIO, TLT, VPL, XME.
Short: XES.

Reflections

I’m deciding to make a little change in how I write these daily trade reports. The nuts and bolts of what happened will still be reported, but I’m moving those down to the bottom of the post. The journey to becoming a better trade is not a reflection of the trades I take, but what I notice and how I think about the trades I do (or do not) take. If the reflections are the important part, then they should come first.

As you’ll see below, perhaps because I framed no trades this week, the portfolio is down to only two open positions, and one of those barely survived its stop loss on Friday. For that reason, I feel like I will be starting fresh on Monday morning.

The systems I presently trade buy pullbacks in markets trending upwards. Looking at the daily or weekly charts for my favorite targets, very few show strong upward trends at the moment. For the past several weeks, perhaps even 2-3 months, they have been trading in the same range. If there isn’t a 2:1 reward:risk ration available for the trade, I’ll pass on it. Since I started using 2ATR as my position size, that means I need 4ATR of possible movement to the upside before I will enter the trade. In this quieter more sideways movement of the market, that is leaving me with fewer trades to take. My reflections for this weekend leave me wondering if I should go back to a smaller risk amount to frame my trades, or if I just sit on my hands until the market provides me with the opportunities I know.