Oct 17th – Sitting on hands

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Boy it is funny, I want to go long at such poor times. I work on getting better at directional trading, follow the charts not my emotions.


Boy it is funny, I want to go long at such poor times. I work on getting better at directional trading, follow the charts not my emotions. I have a few nice trades that benefit greatly from this market’s selloff. I am mildly kicking myself for selling off MER from last week, KBH, and IWM. I made a little money on those but sheesh.

Now this is what I like to hear. Imagine my trading gains to be free of tax.

I was looking at getting long XLB and MTW, but XLB’s trend has broken hard. Sell signals have been flashing for the past 3 days, the channel charts I put up on the weekend told the story. Rather than taking long entries on my real accts, I satisfied my need to trade and placed them in my Paper Trading acct. It has saved me lots of real money. Fortunately, my calendars are working very well. I have been up all but 1 day in the past 17 and today is of no exception.
I am disappointed in USB. Come on already spread, open up. I am sitting on a powder keg of possibility. I am stalking some nice new entries as well, but at this point nothing. I did make a few nice trade entries and exits on Tuesday:
Tuesday trades:
MEDX – 4 unit of the Jan/Feb 15p for .15. Nice profit. I still have 1 unit.
PPCO – 3 units of Dec/Jan 10p for .10. I wanted out because the underlying dropped to 7.70. I didn’t want to risk assignment. the Jan 10p only had .10 of premium left in it. I was happy to get out with a .20profit.
UTHR – 70p calendar, entered and exited 1 unit for a quick .30 profit. I noticed whoever bought with me a few days back is trying to get out of a remaining 20 contracts, he sold 10 with me when I exited a few days back.
Wednesday’s Trade
PGH – Bought 200 sh @ 18.56 (entry position). Making an entry can be such a chore for me. I did use some daytrading techniques to establish my entry. Namely, channels and Level 2 depth. But the real reason for adding the stock to my portfolio was two fold: 1) PGH is a trust levered to Natural Gas, and I believe we are in early stages of a breakout there. and 2) The dividend is 14.6%, which it has been paying at those levels since 2005. I am going to do my best to not even follow this daily. It can be so difficult for me.

PGH weekly chart. Does it look like a Gartley Pattern?

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Gartley Pattern

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Natural Gas 1 yr daily chart
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Predictions: This is nothing but an chartist guess. DOW 13,500 gaining support of the 50MA
SPX – 1520, which is the mid point of the current channel.
Isn’t it something how a few days ago the media is so incredibly bullish, and now the Subprime redux is here. Which side are you on?
The China FXI blasted to new highs again.

One thought on “Oct 17th – Sitting on hands”

  1. hi jonathan – guess you must be happy that it’s october & the snows are here (there!).
    so i was looking at your 3rd quarter review & at the list, alks, medx, pdli, etc….
    i am just wondering how do you come up with these? the same ones over & over, or by some filter… i do not trade options (yet)- just too many moving parts, but you do make interesting reading.
    anyways, thanks for your posts!

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