Tuesday trade - CF

This was a nice 3R trade off of a bear flag. I covered at 122 as the S&P was hitting 50 DMA support at 1373, and my target was reached.

Wednesday trade - CAL

Today was a good day to be trading. This trade really tested my patience though. Most of my trades last less than an hour or two. But oil kept going up and the market kept going down so there was no reason to exit. Some of the other airlines were going down faster but I liked the descending triangle setup on the daily charts for CAL. I entered at the break of the ORL and exited when I saw a couple of volume spikes on the 5 minute charts as CAL approached 14. I nearly got filled at the low of the day so I'm happy with my exit. I had a pretty strong feeling that the 1410 level was going to break down after almost slipping through around 11 a.m and after testing this level twice yesterday. The negative FOMC minutes helped pushed the S&P past 1410 and out of a rising wedge formation.

Identifying trending days

Today was a pretty nice uptrending day after the initial move down. To take advantage of these days you want to recognize them as soon as possible. One tool I use is the TICK. Trending days are one sided where there are mostly buyers or mostly sellers. You can see that the TICK today was mostly positive throughout the day. When it did go negative around 2:00EST, it only hit -280, while on the positive side the TICK peaked at 1753.

Monday trade - WM

Today was really choppy so I was on edge. I had a good entry in WM but then all the other banking stocks made a big move up. In retrospect staying in this trade would have been good, but exiting seemed right at the time. I've noticed that on low volume, choppy days, there is slightly less herding among stocks within a sector. On these types of days I will place less importance on what stocks in the same sector are doing going forward.