Trader MD

My apologies to all the readers who've supported this blog. I should have come to this decision a bit sooner. I've tried to hold off in the attempt to resume blogging at some point. I feel that about a month ago my ability to blog has gone down hill. It's a combination of less time, more focus on trading setups and a fairly busy personal/work life.

At the present time, I'm simply unable to put in the effort and set aside the time to blog consistently.

I will still be trading on a regular basis. The markets have definitely been more difficult over the last 2 months. I feel like I've navigated them fairly well. Most of the accounts I manage are at or near all time highs. Had I gone through a similar trading environment even as little as 6 months ago, I doubt I would have been able to say the same.

I've learned a lot about trading through blogging and definitely appreciate the time put in by other bloggers. You never really realize how much time and effort is put into blogging until you attempt to do so yourself.

In the future event that I will be able to resume blogging, I'll be sure and get the word out.

Thanks to all of you for your support on this blog and thanks to Jamie, HCPG, Brian Shannon and Jason Leavitt, among many others, for helping me become the trader I am.

I wish you all the best of luck!

Posted by Trader M.D. at 11:56 AM 2 comments

Labels: General

Fairly rigid daily schedule (M-F), which involves being productive as much of the time as possible.

(All times are PST.)
5:25-30 AM: Wake up. Begin reading through the days headlines, while listening to CNBC in the background. Sort gapper lists.
6:15 AM: Heat some breakfast + Tea.
6:30 AM: Market opens. Look for base & break trades, watch list triggers, scan through intraday and daily charts.
At some point between then at 8:15 AM get dressed and be ready to leave for work.
8:15 AM: leave for work.
8:30 AM: arrive @ work, briefly check on any open positions
8:30 AM - 12 noon: Clinic patients. It's ok to sneak in a few quotes, trades &/or order adjustments in between patients :)
12 noon - 1 PM: Usually entails driving back home to watch the market close and grabbing something for lunch.
1PM to 5-7 PM: More work. Usually involves following hospital patients.

(Then depending on what time I'm out of the hospital, I try and run one-two errand/chore type thing every day: Grocery shopping, dishes, laundry, cleaning up, pay bills, etc.)

7:30-8:30 PM: Gym, Shower.
8:30-9:15 PM: Fix and eat dinner.
9:15-11:30 PM: Usually a combination of making phone calls, checking up on what happened to the markets during the day, reviewing the intraday and daily charts for the indices, visiting a few sites on the blogroll and finally looking through about 200-300 charts for any setups that jump out at me.
11:30 PM: Sleep. :)

Posted by Trader M.D. at 11:16 PM 6 comments

Labels: General

My entry in USO on Tuesday was around 98.50. I exited some on Wednesday @ 99.50ish (Tuesday's afternoon high), some on Thursday morning in Premarket around 102, and I tried to let the rest run but was stopped out below 99.80.

I picked up RBN @ Tuesday's close around 50.85, closed 1/2 just below Wednesday's Pivot R2 (below 52.07), and tried to let the rest run but was stopped out below 51.20 just before Thursday's close.

On Thursday I picked up RIMM @ 119 and probably closed it a bit too soon @ 122.50. Oh well :)

As for QLD (ultra long Qs), I've been nibbling at a small position as we are in the process of forming a rounded bottom on the Q's. I'm looking to add to it on a solid close / backtest of 75.

Despite only spending about 2 hours of total market time in front of the trading desk a day (thanks to being on the West Coast), I've had a pretty solid July. It looks like all my planning and keeping positions on a tight leash during this month have worked out well. 1 Month doesn't mean much in the long run, butif this is any indication of trading while working, I'm definitely happy with it.

This weekend, I'll try and put together a bit about my daily schedule and what has worked for me during what has been a fairly crazy July. In essence, it comes down to taking fewer positions, keeping them on a tight leash and staying disciplined about the trades obviously and maybe just as important the daily routine.

I'll also be sure to post charts of my entries / exits so its a bit easier to visualize.

That's all the time I have for now.

Good luck out there.

Posted by Trader M.D. at 5:48 AM 0 comments

Labels: General, Oil, qqqq, RBN, RIMM

Sigh looks like the building I'm living in wasn't really wired all that well.

When my internet was fixed in the first place, someone else's service got disconnected. I'm sure while I was out of town over the weekend, or sometime last week that person put in a call to get their service fixed... and now mine is all screwed up again.

Sigh. Hopefully this won't be a back and forth ordeal.

As far as DUG goes, I started partialling out at ~28.65 early Thursday morning. There was no real logic other than the fact that the trade was up >10% in less than 24 hours. At that point you have to start taking part of your position off, espescially in this market. I still have a small position (1/4 of what I had put on in the first place) left that I'm going to try and let it run higher.

Posted by Trader M.D. at 8:15 PM 1 comments

Labels: DUG, General, Swing

Now that there's 1 trading day left in June, and the fact that I really haven't been able to trade all week, I'm looking forward to the 2nd half of the year.

I've been compiling goals and altering my trading strategy to incorporate the fact that I will now be away from my trading desk more often than I will be at it.

I figure I will have the first hour to hour and a half of each trading day to make trades and observe the market in real time. The rest of my market observations and trade planning will take place in the evenings when the market is closed.

The one thing I'm currently contemplating is what to do with day trades that still look good when I have to step out each morning.

Right now I figured that the bread and butter of my day trading strategy going forward will depend on the gap base & break setup I've been using more frequently over the last few months. The reason I say that, is because these trades can setup as early as a few minutes into the trading day and often have quick exits.

Getting back to managing trades away from the desk. My only real consistent way of following the market when I'm working, will be off of my Palm Treo (soon to be replaced with the new iPhone). The huge drawback of this is that I still don't know of a way to chart in real time off of it, and pages can load very slowly.

Another option is to get some type of wireless internet connection for the laptop and have that on me at all times. That's still up for debate and has to be looked into.

Finally the last option is to remain in the trade with a trailing stop.

For now I think my best option is to close out any day trades that I may be in before I leave my desk each morning. If I do attempt any remote management of day trades, it will be thoroughly tested via paper trading first.

In general though, the majority of my trades and trading profits will now come from swing trades. Just based on current market conditions alone, I'm guessing this will be harder than day trading has been the last few months.

As far as blog postings of my trades goes: Postings will now generally be in the evenings. I will still try to post every daytrade and swing trade I make. Posts definitely will not be as prompt as they were before (I used to try and post as soon as the market closed), as I will be away from my trading desk at the market close.

Wish me luck, I'm gonna need it :)

Posted by Trader M.D. at 12:22 PM 6 comments

Labels: General

Didn't get a chance to put together a post yesterday.

It's been fairly frustrating around here over the last few days and will be for the rest of the week.

Although I moved up my furniture into my apartment a week and a half ago, I didn't actually move in until this last weekend.

During that week in between, I requested that the A/C be fixed and well... it still hasn't. Its about 85-86 deg F inside at any given time. Even leaving the windows open at night only drops the temp by a few degrees. So it hasn't really been easy to sleep.

Cable/Satellite, which was supposed to be installed on Monday, will now be installed Saturday. They didn't have the reciever in stock, wth? Overall, not a big deal, but it would have been nice to have.

And most importantly, my internet, which should have been installed weeks ago, won't be installed until Friday. I swear AT&T is filled with some of the most incompetent people ever. I called up originally about a month ago, trying to setup dry-loop DSL (no phone line). They said DSL wasn't available at the address, as the address didn't exist. wth?!

Then I was told by the apartment manager, and others that DSL was indeed available, so I put in an order through a secondary company. The secondary company tells me the order goes through and that it will be setup very soon.

I give it a few days and call up AT&T again to find out that they have received no such order, and that I have to put in the order all over again.

Blah....

I have to say I have a ton more respect for those that are able to trade on their laptops and laptops alone, or just off of 1 screen. It's not easy.

I most likely won't be trading much for the rest of the week due to work obligations and lack of an internet connection.

I'll try to put together some setups or other useful information during that time if I'm able to.

As far as AMSC goes, I probably should have known better.

I took it it long as it based around 46.00 and broke through that level at ~11:45. My initial target was the recent morning highs of ~47.40. My stop was just below the base at ~45.50

Initially it broke out and looked promising but it began to gradually reverse and I was stopped out.

Here's AMSC:

Posted by Trader M.D. at 5:42 AM 3 comments

Labels: AMSC, BasenBreak, Failed, General

Got back pretty late last night and I was exhausted.

Looks like I picked a bad day to miss.

AAPL, RIMM, SINA, SOHU, BIDU, FLS, NSC, & the dry shippers all had solid moves.

Posted by Trader M.D. at 12:58 PM 0 comments

Labels: General

I had a great day and I wanted to highlight a setup I used to trade CSX after their earnings broke. You can call it an earnings setup per se... but I didn't actually enter until after the earnings of course.

We'll see how much longer Wordpress continues to have bugs with their image uploading system. I'm already some what dissatisfied with the fact that I can't run a lot of script type commands, including some minimal advertising. So I maybe switching over to blogger soon. I'll be sure to let you know if/when I do.

Re: The market.

Today's rally was for real. As I mentioned in my late post last night, we've begun the next leg higher and we should continue higher for the short to intermediate term as long as there are no real major shocks. Any minor shocks are buying opportunities for those of you that like to buy pullbacks.

Sure the volume today wasn't great, but if you remember the rally that took place off the lows in August didn't really have accumulation type volume either.

Money has to be put to work somewhere. Oil, as I highlighted early last week, has basically hit my primary target of $115-116 today. Who knows how high we could eventually go as the dollar continues to weaken. Anyhow, enough self promotion... and back to my point:

• sure the economy looks bad and could potentially get worse
• sure inflation is creeping up and is possibly out of control
• sure housing prices are falling and probably will continue to fall

That being said, money has to be put to work somewhere. Cash has been building on the sidelines for weeks and as inflation creeps up and the dollar continues to fall, the value of that cash decreases. If you're going to do nothing and lose $$, you might as well put some of it to work.

• With rates so low (and inflation creeping up), bonds don't exactly look like a great place to put $$
• Gold, Silver, etc need time to correct &/or consolidate their huge recent run ups
• Only so much money can be put towards shorting the dollar (especially at these levels - and no I'm not calling for a rebound or making a dollar prediction), or in other currencies
• Housing is in a depression
• In addition, money managers get paid for returns (it's also convenient that they're not managing their money, but yours)
• Oil is in a similar situation as the dollar: only so much money can be put towards the long side, especially at these levels
• Expectations for stocks have been taken down quite a bit. When WaMu can come out and report a bigger loss than expected and still move up nicely and when Intel can come out with average to slightly better than average numbers and have nearly a 10% move higher, you know people are just itching to put $$ into stocks

As a result, stocks have plenty of reasons to move higher (at least for the short to intermediate term)

*edit*

Other things to like:

• The $VIX broke its up trendline
• The IYT broke out
• The XLE Broke out & set new all time highs
• The XLB broke out & set new all time highs
• The Nasdaq/Russell lead the way, the Financials participated their fair share, and the Semis have rebounded nicely

Posted by Trader M.D. at 12:40 PM 0 comments

Labels: General, Recap

My ThinkorSwim charts have been experiencing some data issues over the last few days. I've noticed a lot of gaps on my charts for commonly traded issues.

Ah well. It's kept me on the sidelines for the most part. I had a nice short trade on MA yesterday that I'll try and post later. Some swing trades I've entered have done well and I'll post an update on those as well.

Posted by Trader M.D. at 11:42 AM 0 comments

Labels: General, ThinkorSwim

In the coming days (it may take a couple of weeks, as I'll be out of town next weekend) I'm going to be working towards adding posts that will discuss:

• Things I've learned along the way (over the 7-8 months I've traded)
• My trading platform and what I watch every single day
• My watch lists and how I determine which stocks I follow
• The services I pay for and why
• Books I've read and which ones I'd recommend
• What I'm currently reading and plan to read
  
• My goals for this blog

In the mean time, I'll still be posting a trade from each trading day.

That's a pretty weak first post, but I figure I have to start somewhere :)

Posted by Trader M.D. at 10:09 AM 0 comments

Labels: General