The Official Trading Thread
- Thread starter mGrunin
- Start date
What were your positions heading into the QE announcement? Since that pop on Wednesday, SPY has pulled back a decent bit. From a high of $173.60 to a closing price of $170.71 today. Nearly 2% pullback from the highs already. We are actually trading at exactly the same level we were at before the news about no tapering. The minutes before that announcement, SPY was trading at $170.90. So we are even below that!
the gulf between options trading and value investing is so wide that its like comparing affiliate marketing to animal husbandry. trading guys don't evaluate businesses (they think they do, but c'mon, that's not real analysis) & value guys don't evaluate market conditions.
apples & oranges.
Drave answered it the same way I would have. Investing and trading are two different beasts. When you invest, you are concerned about a company's financial picture. When you trade, you are concerned with the stock's immediate price movement. At the end of the day, if X pattern is forming by price action, it does not matter what company is behind that price action, the same position would be taken.
For example, for this past week I had this chart on NFLX put together and posted on my forum:
A support level turned to a resistance level of 3 tops. Then finally we break it, I initiate my long position on NFLX. This was on the 18th. On the 20th I close the position for a 220% gain. Netflix was trading at $314 when I closed it. It didn't matter to me what company formed this pattern or broke this top, I expected a specific price action after the break.
Keep in mind that I cannot be oblivious to company news even if I just trade price action. For example, tomorrow we should hear on the sales figures of the iPhone 5S and 5C from Apple. The headlines will dominate Apple's price action tomorrow and no technical trading will be able to predict the reaction. Trading price action going into tomorrow is futile. Once the stock does finally pop or drop, and begins to digest its movement, that is when technical trading comes back into effect.
There is a relevance of price action in the sense of capping a move in either direction. Lets say for the past two weeks we keep on selling off on Apple at X level and tomorrow we move towards that level, we could still see difficulty or some sort of consolidation before the next move up. But again, these sort of levels would need to be located at the very least 2-3% away from current market level otherwise Apple will still blow through immediate support or resistance levels on news drop.
There is a relevance of price action in the sense of capping a move in either direction. Lets say for the past two weeks we keep on selling off on Apple at X level and tomorrow we move towards that level, we could still see difficulty or some sort of consolidation before the next move up. But again, these sort of levels would need to be located at the very least 2-3% away from current market level otherwise Apple will still blow through immediate support or resistance levels on news drop.
This trade would have turned out a great winner this past week. Since the recommendation of first going long at $43.53; FB closed the week at $47.49. If you had aggressive call positions for the week, then such a move is worth about 350-450% return.
Time to go long on Gold.
This was a play off the pivot here. I made it clear that if $131.80 level is lost, you want to get the hell out of your long position again. SO while we did move over $132 on the 19th and opened around there on the 20th. Before the close on the 20th, we lost that $131.80 level and sold off all the way down to $127.90. Coming out to a 2.94% pullback. In other words...we ended up confirming that $131.80 as a resistance level, failing at being a support level. The failure there was a short trigger. This was an easy high reward vs low risk setup since we played it off a pivot.
This is pretty interesting:
Some traders got 'no taper' decision news early
Looks like somebody in Chicago traded on the Fed news 2-3 milliseconds after it was released, which is faster than the information takes to travel from DC to Chicago lol.
Some traders got 'no taper' decision news early
Looks like somebody in Chicago traded on the Fed news 2-3 milliseconds after it was released, which is faster than the information takes to travel from DC to Chicago lol.
JCP good buy at these levels. Heavily undervalued + CEO comments today, just bought Oct calls.
Well so much for that....caught it on the upswing and trailing stop took me out for a minimal gain. Gonna be interesting to see what happens tomorrow.