Monday, June 11, 2007

Dummy Trade of the Day - Apple Inc. (Public, NASDAQ:AAPL)

I took a long entry on AAPL on a low risk, narrow, base break midday. It started out very well but reversed abruptly. As price fell below $125.50 volume started to pick up, so I quickly tightened the stop to $125.00 and was taken out. I perused Briefing.com to find a reason for the reversal but everything seemed on the up and up. However, the lack of any new products or big announcements at WWDC seemed to be putting a negative bias on the stock. I waited for the next 15 minute bar to complete itself and decided to short AAPL. I only took a small position, because knowing AAPL, they could be saving the best for last as the presentation was ongoing.

Guess not, the stock continued lower, slowly at first, but on increasing volume. I took a partial as price swooned into my third level PP. After a brief consolidation, it continued down to my fourth PP where I covered the balance and went long. The late day long was a waste of time as AAPL barely bounced into the close.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Wow... thats some juggling... nice trades. Just goes to show us that when you know what you are looking for, you can really manuever in the trade. Quick, decisive, and confident action. Keep up the great trading!

Anonymous said...

Nice switch from long to short. In general however, I can't see reversing near EOD - too risky to fight afternoon trend.

Another topic: I struggle with the issue of developing and maintaining watch lists versus just picking daytrade candidates from the high volume gappers. Do you find that you significantly improve your trading by maintaining watch lists, or could you do just as well trading from the gappers only (TraderX like)? Thanks.

TJ said...

Jim,

Some days I do better with the gappers, but lately I'm doing much better with the watch list.

I like preparing ahead and just waiting for the alerts to sound as my planned entry sets up. Most of my watch list are NASDAQ stocks for which I've mapped out all of my PP so it's very easy to manage the trade once I enter. Also, some watch list stocks keep gapping up like CROX again today, so I get 2-for-1 so to speak.

TJ said...

Thanks Bigfish!