This week’s Swing Picks have been posted on TradersCue for those of you who have signed up for the free alerts. For those of you who are interested, you can Go Here to Sign Up or if you have any questions, I recently added a Contact Form Here which affords those of you who don’t wish to post public comments a way to get in touch with me.

Since I started making my stock picks public back in March, my portfolio is up over 30% Y.T.D. In TradersCue I assumed a starting equity of $10,000 and witha goal of making 2-4 picks per week. Each pick has pre-defined entry & exit targets but use your own judgement when trading these securities as individual trader’s risk tolerance can vary greatly and you must do your own due diligence before investing in any security.

Here are the completed trades that have been posted so far this year:

A brief note about the above results:

I have posted the above results here because there is a programming error that I recently noticed on TradersCue.com which causes certain profits from the short-sale of stocks not to be recognized thus causing my Cummulative PnL % to be off by 10 % points according to the statistics on my TradersCue Stat Page Here.

I have contacted Derrick Rapp, the owner of TC and he is aware of the problem and assures me that it will be fixed in the next update but gave no timeframe as to when that might be. So as long as the error persists, I will be posting the Cummulative Stastics here as well to ensure the accurate reflection of my stock picks’ performance.

Daily Score: +.11

Batting Average: 66.67%
Full Stop %: 22.22%
EpT: .56
 
 
I traded well today given the low volatility in the morning session & overwhelmingly high volatility this afternoon. I took one full stop on my first trade of the day which really was just a bad trade. I saw a TRIX hook- & took it but there wasn’t enough there to warrant an entry & I was justifiably punished. By this afternoon I had recovered and was slightly above B.E.

Then came the announcement….and TradeStation locked up! So I still had the capability to enter trades in Interactive Brokers via Ninja Trader but my charts were completely locked up. I could see the price action flying but it was just too much for TradeStation to handle & so I had to chart mentally using only the tape and hope that I was right.

This was my first time trying to do this so I really had no idea whether or not I’d be able to pull it off but I was up for trying! So I placed my first trade & a few seconds later took a full stop. I then waited for another opportunity and went long this time & scored a quick couple points. At this point, I was up on the day and decided to call it quits as my charts still had not unlocked & if I’ve learned one thing about TradeStation, its that you don’t screw around with it when its having a bad day.

Upon analyzing those 2 mentally charted trades this evening once my charts were back online, the first one was horrible! There was a double momentum divergence signalling in the direction opposite of that which I entered, so if anything, I should have been playing the other side of the market! Makes me really appreciate the value of those charts and how bad I am a tape reading only :-/ The second trade though was a beautiful trade playing a breakout of a very nice base & exit at the next real resistance level.

So 1 out of 2 isn’t bad. But I hope I don’t have many opportunities where I have to make a choice to try again!
 
 

Well I had a nice time at the Outter Banks with my wife celebrating our 3rd Anniversary last week :-D and was looking forward to getting back in the swing of the markets here but ran into some technical difficulties this morning that I have yet to resolve.

I use Ninja Trader as the front end for my Interactive Brokers’ Trader Workstation but the two programs aren’t communicating with each for some reason. I’ve placed some emails to NT support asking for some direction but I rely very heavily on the interface and as such only had the confidence to place a very limited number of trades today, which is just as well anyway given the narrow range for today in anticipation of tomorrows Fed Announcement.

I only hope I’m up and running by then!

I was able to perform a lot of needed PC maintenance today as I was trying to find/fix the problem. I ran across a great little free diagnostic tool called HijackThis You can learn more about it by clicking on the link to the left and download it from Download.com. But basically it allows you detect and remove spyware that your Anti-spyware software misses as well as customize which programs you wish to open upon startup (I really was amazed at how many I had starting up that I didn’t need to be open that were just sucking up resources!)

You will have to read the entire article to get a feel for what you’re doing but I was able to free up quite a bit of space and resources on my PC after putting the time into it. And Dad, if you’re reading this, you especially need to check this out given how slow your computer’s been running as of late! :-)

Good trading tomorrow everyone, should be an interesting day.