Stock Trader's Diary

Patience is the word today. I have my portfolio set up for a market correction. I believe it will happen soon. I was partially set up for it prior to the market decline on February 27th, but moved more to the short size on that day. I have since added to the bias to the point where my portfolio is now 80% short and 20% long. Yesterday was an uncomfortable day with the market going up, but the volume wasn't there to support it.

I would not be surprised if the market goes against my position in the short run. There has been a massive PUT volume for the last week and I anticipate the market will want to 'take out' a major portion of the PUT position before actually going down significantly. These puts are time sensitive and the longer the market can hang on, the more value will waste away on these puts.

But patience is the word today. My trading is 10% positioning at the right time and 90% waiting for the market to move.

Happy Trades!!!

This is the Diary Of My Trading Life. After 20 plus years, I am an still a canvas waiting to be completed and you can follow the new brush strokes. Many have started a diary and quit. Many have decided they lost too much money and that trading is not for them.

I know trading is for me, but I am still finding my style, my rules. You must trade with what you are comfortable with, what you know. I am not a full time trader, so swing trading is about the most I can do.

My very first trades were in 1979 and I was trading commodities. I did so miserably, lost money so quickly, I hid it from most of my family and saved like a mad man to replace the money.

After that, I had a house, children, a family and a couple of businesses. There were times in those 20 years, where I manually charted commodities, trying to prove technical trading would work consistently enough to use. That's right, I manually charted graphs before there were even PCs.

I bought my first PC in 1984, for the express purpose of tracking stocks and graphing them. I wanted to write my own technical analysis software, but was discouraged by a friend who thought all software that could possibly be written for a PC had already been written -- why reinvent the wheel. Hmmmm.

Finally, sometime during the late nineties, with stock data becoming easily available, I started writing my own technical analysis programs. I have much more to write and to test. It will always be a work in progress, but it is my hobby, and I enjoy it.

I hope you do too.

Happy Trades!!!