Member Trading JournalsAnyone can start their very own public trading journal to document their winning and losing trades, get opinions from community members, and learn from each others' trading experiences.
Hello fellow traders and learners.
Welcome to the Memoirs of a day trader. I am a full time stock day trader since mid 2006 and have found that I love trading as a career. After an initial string of losses I have since been profitable. This is due, in part, to learning from a former member of the CME who used to trade commodity futures on the floor there.
Some say the reason why I have found success is because I have had that leg up. This may be true, but what people don't know is that all he showed me was a few governing principles that I have based my entire methodology on. These are the principles of price action, volume, and crowd psychology. Everything I know about trading goes back to these three. And all of my teachings will in some way be about these things. I didn't used to believe that I could be a profitable trader, but now I not only believe that, but also believe that you can become one too, and because of this my personal mission on tradingApples.com is to help you, whoever you are, become a consistently profitable trader.
So welcome to my memoirs. All questions and comments are welcome, no matter how challenging they are.
For my first entry here I have a video of my live trading after taking a long and very relaxing summer vacation. I felt a little rusty as I jumped back into trading as if I'd never stopped. Old habits die hard so of course the first trade I took was of AAPL. I was really nervous about my first trade back because as much as I don't believe in nonsensical bullshit I couldn't shake the thought that if my first trade was a loser I would be cursed for the whole winter. I was really glad when I got the nice pop I was expecting on that first play. And then ladies and gentlemen I did something that I'm not sure I've even ever done before, and that is trade GOOG. That's right, I bought 150 shares of google after it broke highs aaaaand...nothing, made like 30 bucks on it or something. I guess google makes new highs all day for the past 50 years or something so it was no big deal. I would really like to see AAPL make a new high somewhere above 200 sometime soon. And if price comes back down below that level if it fails to rally we are looking at a No Show straight from moneyville ( I'm moving their one day).
I like your explanation about raw price action and why the price moves like it does. In the AAPL trade, you saw temporary exhaustion by the sellers and jumped in when the buyers were taking advantage of that temporary exhaustion. Simple concept. I like that.
Last edited by Jason Major; October 14th, 2009 at 10:44 AM.
Awesome first day back. Again i love the no show and trade it almost exclusively (will explain more when i start my journal soon).
quick question at the end when you were doing something with Skype. is that an open room or something?
Today I managed to catch two pretty good plays, both on AAPL of course. My third play was quite slow and I gotta tell ya, I really hate babysitting positions. I like to get in and out, the quicker the better, whether win or loss. I like moving on to the next opportunity. They say "Good trading is boring"..I find this to be pretty true. Once you get your methods down and there really isn't much else to learn, at least from a technical aspect, trading does tend to be pretty boring day after day. But then something usually happens that shakes you out of the funk. Don't get me wrong, I love trading as an occupation, but I think if trading is exciting there is something wrong. One of my top ten golden rules of trading, which I actually have never shared with anyone, is "Never, under any circumstances, use the markets as a vehicle for self expression." There are many ways people express themselves whether they know it or not, and we all have emotions, but the market is the last place for you to be using them. And why is this, well because you need to stand out from the crowd so you have an edge over them, and advantage, and currently the market is very much made up of the raw emotions of others. If you are able to step back and not be controlled by your own emotions you will be able to see clearly how the masses' emotions are guiding price.
Let's see if you guys can spot this happening in this next live trading video.
hey Shoot...
Thanks for posting the new video (Oct. 15). My only trades for today were the same plays as your first two in the video, almost identical... and for the same reasons. That support area (189.60) for the first trade seemed so strong from the past few days that I chose to enter there as well. On the second trade, I was going off of the reasoning that the bulls were most likely temporarily exhausted after the quick, big up move and that the bears would capitalize on that and drive it down a little, so I also shorted around the same area. I like how simple it can be.
hey Shoot...
Thanks for posting the new video (Oct. 15). My only trades for today were the same plays as your first two in the video, almost identical... and for the same reasons. That support area (189.60) for the first trade seemed so strong from the past few days that I chose to enter there as well. On the second trade, I was going off of the reasoning that the bulls were most likely temporarily exhausted after the quick, big up move and that the bears would capitalize on that and drive it down a little, so I also shorted around the same area. I like how simple it can be.
Hahah..is that so? Yea, it's not the first time someone has played the exact same plays as me, but the first time someone played two in a row. Nicely done. I honestly didn't expect the bulls to push it up as much as they did, but when they do things like that it's a great opportunity for a short if the volume isn't too high. And yes, It is quite amazing how simple it can be if you're looking for the right things. I am actually still amazed after a couple years of trading this way that it consistently works, but it does, so I'm not complaining.
Awesome first day back. Again i love the no show and trade it almost exclusively (will explain more when i start my journal soon).
quick question at the end when you were doing something with Skype. is that an open room or something?
Hi Michael,
Hey thanks, yea the no show is in my top lineup for a reason. It's such a great play and happens all the time. Looking forward to checking out your journal ( I don't think you started one yet). So at the end of the video I was actually just talking to a friend on skype so that's what you saw there. I don't have any type of open room or anything like that, although I have thought about posting a thread where I call positions live throughout the day.
Here is a position from October 22nd that I took on RIMM. It was a breakout, for pete's sake it was a breakout that I caught to the upside, there are so many setups for these but very few of them follow through. At least the way that I trade them. I usually end up trading the No Show on fakeouts. So I really only got this one position in today as I was busy earlier and didn't see much going on w/AAPL, which is just ranging around after it broke above 200. Seems like a bearish sign since the bulls are not strong enough to go wild at this point and continue to push it higher. IDK, we'll see what happens. All I know is I'm waiting for the break back below 200 on AAPL in a situation where the broad market begins to correct a bit from all of this bullish crazy stuff thats been going down for the last 7 months. If those two things could happen simultaneously I am a swing trader for the next couple months. WIsh me luck.
Memoirs of a day trader by Shoot
I was really glad when I got the nice pop I was expecting on that first play. And then ladies and gentlemen I did something that I'm not sure I've even ever done before, and that is trade GOOG. That's right, I bought 150 shares of google after it broke highs aaaaand...nothing, made like 30 bucks on it or something. I guess google makes new highs all day for the past 50 years or something so it was no big deal. I would really like to see AAPL make a new high somewhere above 200 sometime soon. And if price comes back down below that level if it fails to rally we are looking at a No Show straight from moneyville ( I'm moving their one day). 
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