Wednesday, April 15, 2009

bought some POT


sssshhhhh....don't tell the cops, see, i had a line .... wait a minute i bought puts on GS...damn i thought i had this killer line, i bought POT last week....and it did me no good. that's it i'm done with POT for ever now....never again am i touching that filthy....stock. hahaha. sigh. chuckle.

yup i bought some GS. bad buy again. should have waited a little bit more and right after i bought it i regreted it. way out of the money so that time decay is gonna eat me alive. what was i thinking. greed of course. also GS showed no weakness afterwards, even though the market did. tough draw.

it's all that filthy, swineish PDT law...worried about the number of trades i can execute...i would have sold otherwise...will sell first thing tomorrow.

of course, i am going out tonight. have been cooped up in my apt. for the last couple of days, ok well 2 days :) hopefully i will not go insane on the beer. plus, i slept at 5am yesterday. not partying. just couldn't sleep. saw a gem of a movie.

Un maledetto imbroglio (1959) by Pietro Germi. Now he's a master of his craft.

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

so tired


i feel so tired these days. no energy. no oomph. it's either because i quit smoking or i just got old all of a sudden. probably a combination of both. so this lack of energy and the non stop nonsense of working in a room with other people took a big toll on my trading recently. i have to hide everything and i can't look at my charts in luxury or just stare at the tape. i was able to get back from the IBM fiasco to near even and then i went and stupidly bought POT.

what's even worse is my handling of the aftermath. in 3 days i managed to loose 11K. unbelievable. i had anticipated the worse case sceanrio for the next day also. i thought we might gap up $2, in which case i'll liquidate at the open and take the hit. unfortunately, i have been drinking a whole lot more lately. like every other day i get drunk and that was one of those days. but, even after that i wouldn't listen to my conscience. i kept thinking to myself collapse this trade...under 85 is still not bad. but, nooooooooo.....i held it over the weekend and watched it rise to 88.5....today with all the bad news and carnage, it was one of the few stocks that went up.

that's the death knell...you know ur fucked when the market goes down and your stock goes up and stays up. i can't tell you how bad i felt in the morning. i wanted to cry. by the afternoon, emotionally i was sucked dry. like a french prisoner about to be guillitoined, i went out and looked at the sky. fuck it. end of the day and it's still at 89. sell at 3. 30 secs to close and i'm liquid again. i just don't care anymore.

i got beaten bad on this one. but, the worst part is. i don't even feel like trading anymore. my parents, all the haters who said day trading is gambling won...i've lost my passion. now, i'm back to being a normal 9 to 5'er. i'll probably end up a fat, alcoholic, do nothing all day fuck, stuck in a dusty government cubicle for the rest of my pathetic miserable life, until i retire and have to move to butt fuck West Virginia, because i have no money.

when i get to 50, i'm definitely buying a gun. no way i'm going out like a dog.

Wednesday, April 8, 2009

on point, but no action


gone are the days of mad volatility. i still remember November, what a bear fest. i was making money hand over fist, left and right, all you had to do was go short. why in the hell did i ever listen to my parents and try to get a job !

i was in early today. sipping my hot chocolate, watching the market. i wanted to go short. i thought there was still some weakness from yesterday to shake out...but overall i still felt we were in a rally mode. GS was weak. other names were okay. i just couldn't see a low risk trade. meh. i had a meeting at 10 am anyway. meeting spilled over. had to go give my car for repairs. went to mexican for lunch.

i come back, there's been a nice rally. the dip down in the morning had been a fake out. unfortunately, the rally was already starting to break. i wanted to short IBM, but meh again. i felt the day would end flattish. there really was no trade.

now here's where i fucked up. what i really wanted to do was a quick scalp on POT. the kind of stuff i used to do back in the day. in and out with a couple hundred bucks profit. 200, 300, hell even 100, it's all good. but, my brain these days thinks more like a swing trader and i fucked up. i didn't watch the tape closely enough. didn't take the small profits when i had the chance. and ended up with an overnight which i totally didn't want.

why? cause POT is really volatile. my position risk is 20 puts, rather than a more manageable 10. we are still in a bull rally. it stayed strong through close. plus, the chart like the market is neutral. we could see a huge gap up or down tomorrow. only thing in my favor, is that hopefully the market will be indecisive tomorrow, swing around and let me offload this position.

so here's the lesson. make up your mind. what kind of a trade is this. Day trade or Swing trade. don't fucking switch them around.

now i need some beer. but not too much.

tuesday was good



i had a mad hangover on tuesday morning, when i woke around 11:30pm....we had gotten the pullback we so desperately needed on IBM...it had dipped to 88.5 and then rebounded. crap. the market looked depressed. i figured i had time to get to work and then game it from there.

i thought the market would go down till the close and i was partly close. the market trended down and then flattened out. particularly, in IBM's case, it wouldn't go down below 88.5. i watched the tape for a long time, but i saw that there was support there, so i sold 20 of the puts for 6.9 and held on to 10. it spiked to 89.3 and i thought yikes, but then it sold downwards to the close. i sold right at the close for 6.8. you have to trade options for a long time to gauge sell levels so well. things get illiquid at the close, but i got lucky.

even though it was a loss overall, it was not so bad, and i am very glad that i'm liquid.

Monday, April 6, 2009

still holding onto IBM puts

i thought it might break big, because it's not buying Sun, which is a kick ass company with a lot of good technology that IBM could use. But, they play it safe. The stock showed okay strength. Today it traded with the market, i.e. it was slightly weak, but there was no huge break to say 98, based on the dip in the futures this morning. sigh!

i still like it's chart. a lot of stocks are trading mid 2007 prices now and these i must say are decent prices. i would be bargain picking here and banking and real estate would be my first choices, not tech, especially not IBM which is just $18 ducks away from it's all time high. YES, 120 or whereabouts i think.

if there is a break in the market, this thing is going downtown and my target is 98....which gives us maybe 7.5 and a breakeven....although i had a sell for 6.8 the whole day today, just on the off chance.

i've been double thinking a lot about this stock, and that is both good and bad. you can never be too cautious. the only bad part is that statistically speaking, almost every time i hold options over 2-3 days, i end up losing money. almost 97% of the time.

i'm watching like a hawk, but fingers crossed.

Friday, April 3, 2009

hold the line

no trades today.

barely even looked at the market. saw that it wasn't going anywhere and needed the rest anyway. will tackle IBM on Monday...need a pullback to get rid of this fucker.

beer, beer and more beer.

Thursday, April 2, 2009

shitty day

BOT 10 IBM Option APR09 105 PUT IBMPA $6.30 ISE(USD) 10:17:02 GMT-0400 on Thu, 02 Apr 2009

yesterday evening, finished a bottle of wine. head said stop. cook some food. heart said go out. keep on drinking. nice time at the bar though. it was empty. only Bill. and then some asshole black air force guy. and then a black chick. i blacked out in the middle of our conversation. don't know how the night ended. i saw in the trash that i had cooked some ramen soup. i didn't smoke. didn't even bum one from Bill.

my internet got cut off. i had been paying the bills intermittently. last time i paid it was $400. i looked at a bill finally. they had bumped me from $60 a month to $140. the wooing period was over. they charged me some outrageous sums of money. i calculated that i had blown $1200 due to laziness. basically, i couldn't see the futures in the morning and was unprepared for the strong open.

got in at 9:30 am. market up strongly. ibm up 2. damn. i should sell ibm. this day has the makings of a very strong rally. i don't do anything. i'm not really in the mood to trade. a litte while later, i see some weakness in GS. the financials are done. rest of the market is playing catchup. i short some more IBM. it will all work out.

in the afternoon, IBM peaked at 102. +4 ducks. just what i thought earlier. tomorrow should be interesting. might have to hold this till next week.

RIMM just came out with earnings. up +10 AH. IBM up +1.17. crap. more fuel for the fire. if i collapse this now, i'm back to square one. all gains for this week evaporated.

no energy. need to rest up.

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

april fool's day


sadly, i could think of no tom foolery...trading sapped all my creative juices.

market/IBM opened down. i should have sold instantly, but thinking of my GS sell from yesterday i hesitated and IBM ran up 1.5 in like 3 min's. i was totally bummed out...thinking should i sell for a loss. partly, new people in my office were to blame. but, then luckily, IBM dived back down to the open prices and this time i did not hesitate. got out of 20 at the lows of the day. phew and good trading.

rest of the day, i watched the rally. it looked strong...would there be a selloff. i was tempted by GS, but thankfully resisted. i decided to rework my IBM short. i am already comfortable with the price action on it for now. i shorted around 97.5 my old levels around 2:30pm, so not so bad...i was hoping for a correction starting around 3pm. there was one, but not big enough and i decided to hold overnight.

i am over 25K now, but i want to build a base before i agressively day trade. anyway with all these people in my room, i can barely think, much less concentrate for something as risky as lightning fast day trading. sigh. it's like i am working two jobs. i don't mind the tech aspects of my job, but hiding my screen from people and having to listen to their inane office politics posturing gets on my nerves. oh well, for now i have to deal with it.

market is still fragile, but we could be in for a very sharp rally. i will probably collapse my current IBM short early tomorrow morning. Fri. is unemployment numbers, but they shrugged off ADP today, so you never know.