Tuesday, May 08, 2007

Trade of the Day - Valero Energy Corporation (Public, NYSE:VLO)

The VLO setup on a pullback to the pivot point support area used to be one of my bread and butter patterns when I first started trading. So I guess you could say that I went back to my roots on this trade. VLO broke above its 2 day slope allowing for a low risk entry. I took a partial as price started to consolidate midday and moved my stop just under the last WRB preceding the consolidation. As I tightened my stop near the end of the session, I was stopped out.
AAPL carved out a NR7 bar within a flat base consolidation just prior to breaking out of the base. After that it held it 5 period MA on a closing basis throughout the afternoon. A doji in the last hour forced me to tighten my stop and I was taken out.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

You da man with that VLO trade. Monster trade.

TJ said...

Thanks Alex!

Anonymous said...

Hi Jamie,

Can you please explain how you spot these setups? Everyday I look forward to reading your post and seeing what you traded. Your concept are very straight forward and looking at your chart I can see exactly what you are talking about but my question is, take for example your VLO trade, before the 7th or 8th bar I wouldn’t have spotted that trade. How do you know where to be at the right time on all your trades? Obviously this was not a gap up play so are you stalking this stock because you anticipated such a move or did you so happen to run across this setup. Thx.

TJ said...

Hey Andrew,

I have a watch list of about 50 stocks that I look at everyday. These stocks are found through scans. I look for liquid stocks with an ATR (average true range) over $1.00 and an ADX (momentum) above 25 that are trading near multi-year highs just like the markets. VLO has an average daily volume of 9-10 million, an ATR of 1.6 and the ADX is running around 40. I look at my watch list every night and set alerts at key support and resistance levels so that I can be aware of potential reversals and breakouts.

I update the watch list on a regular basis - once every two weeks, but if I find a very volatile stock on a gapper scan I might add that one as well. For example DNDN.

On the VLO trade I had the pivot point marked when it was resistance last week and yesterday it set off my alert when it fell back into it on the 10:00 bar. Then its just a metter of coming back to the chart every 15 minutes looking for a suitable entry point.

Anonymous said...

what program/site do u use for u atr/adx candidates?
thanks
p

TJ said...

I run my combined Volume/ATR/ADX scans on Stockcharts.com