IPG

All posts tagged IPG

Swing Trades

No swing trades were opened or closed for 6 June 2018, so there was no trade report yesterday. No trades were opened today, but 8 trades were closed: MSFT, CSCO(2), CRM, RIO, TWTR, IPG, and XES. Total return for the 8 positions: +5.16R

This leaves the portfolio reduced to 8 positions, currently showing +5.38R
Long: AXP, DWDP, GILD, JPM, KR, XME.
Short: AA, EWW.

Reflections

While the market indexes are showing strength, I feel like it is not broad strength. Select companies are doing well, and others seem to simply be hanging on. Either I’m looking at more stocks that are under-performing, or I need to broaden my watch list.

I’m still working on some other extended posts with reflections on my insights and thoughts from this week. Somethings have gone well. Others not so well. The saying goes that if you ask better questions, you get better answers. I also believe if you ask frequent questions, even if it’s the same question, you may get different answers. Reporting my results here forces me to ask the same questions over and over again, and by doing this, I feel like I’m coming up with better answers, or at least a better sense of what I am doing in the market. Most importantly, I’m starting to see some of the ways that my personality and beliefs trigger my behaviors in the market.

There is a confidence that comes from positive trade results, but there is also confidence that comes from doing the same tasks every day. Trading is a complicated system, just like an automobile. I’m looking to get my trading to the point where it works just as reliably to generate income as the car works to get me from place to place. While you can certainly purchase trading systems like you buy a car, the market continues to change, so with a trading system you bought, you will never know when it needs maintenance or is broken beyond repair.

Think of how much knowledge has to go into building a car. Even a gifted auto mechanic is unlikely to know how to actually make the glass for the windshield or the steel for the engine. I will likely never know all the intricacies of how an order I place to buy or sell stock gets from my computer to the exchange for execution, but I need that process to be just as reliable as my car. If it breaks, I either need to know how to fix it, or how to have the problem fixed for me.

Trading requires not just the mastery of an auto mechanic, but also the skills of a professional driver. Great returns demand great skills. While it may not be safe to go slowly on all the roads all the time, it certainly doesn’t require as much driving skill as racing around a test track at 200 mph. I’m looking for market trouncing returns, so I have to keep working on my trading until I am at the same level as the professional race car driver.

Swing Trades

Following my observations yesterday about not framing trades for the short side, I framed 6 trades for possible entry and most of them were for possible short entries. The three that were willed were all shorts: EWW, AA, and IPG. WYNN opened below the stop, so both positions were closed out, netting +.32R total for the two trades.

There are now 21 open trades showing +5.07R:
Long: AXP, CRM, CSCO(2), DWDP, GILD, JPM, KR, MSFT, RIO, SLB(2), TWTR, XES(2), XLE(2), XME.
Short: AA, EWW, IPG.

Reflections

The month of May provided 54 trades which netted a paltry +.35R. Graphs of the trade results are included below.

The largest win was +2.34R. There were six trades generating losses greater than 1R. Three of those six were just a penny or two away, so can be ascribed to slippage on stop order fills. Two were opening gaps below the stop. Only one of the six can be ascribed to improper stop placement. I had two positions on in one stock and the second fill was higher than the first, but the stop was left at the price based on the first entry.

The month started in a sideways normal condition and moved more bullish, but also became more quiet. Thirty-six of the trades were channel trades. All six of the losses greater than 1R were channel trades. Clearly this is the easiest system for me digest for entry points. Many of the positions moved in my favor after entry, but the back and forth sideways and drop in volatility led me to close out many of these positions as losses, even when they had been winners at different times. Here’s the plot sequence for just the channel trades in May:

The above is based upon date closed. Here’s the same chart based on date opened:

While I was starting to feel like I might have been improving as the month progressed, when you see the graph by open date, that improvement is minimal. It should also be noted that these are all trades closed in May. Some were opened in April and held into May. Any positions opened in May but not yet closed, are not reflected in either of these graphs.

I believe all these trades were placed with the 2ATR initial position sizing stop loss. For my next step, I’d like to analyze the maximum negative excursion for each position in terms of ATR to determine if there is some earlier point when I can cut the losses to either keep them from running to -1R and/or change my position sizing so that with a tighter stop loss, my gains are multiples of my losses.

General conclusion for today: there is always more to consider about the log of trade results, and your viewpoint can influence the conclusions you might be tempted to draw.