Friday, May 13, 2011

CREE swing trade

This is a bit late but Blogger posting was down for over 24hrs.

Someone in our trading room (Leonard!) mentioned the daily chart on CREE a few days back. I took care to take notice as this person has demonstrated good ability to buy on pullback and support, something that I have been trying to improve. When I took a look I liked what I saw. If you click on the chart below you can see how tight the price action was getting, and on the 10th CREE put in a bullish gravestone doji; good risk/reward entry point.


So the next day I had CREE up on my screen first thing, and took it on the break of the high. You can see the entry by clicking on the chart below. I scaled out of ⅔’s of the position by days end, and sold the last ⅓ today for a 9% ($39.38 to $43.24) gain in 2 days. I do think CREE potentially has a lot more upside, it may have put in a bottom here, or it could plunge to new lows, only time will tell.

Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Silver away

The gloat: Sold my core position and the rest of my swings in SLV today. I bought a full position in it for $18.50 back in August, sold chunks along the way, and held on to 1/4 of the position as my core holding. I sold it today at $41.94, a return of 126% on that portion!



The important part: This was a very hard decision, but I was suddenly watching SLV too much, and I realized that if it gave up more in price, that the mental harm of that would be greater to my trading psyche than selling and watching it go to new highs (which may well happen). It was just hurting too much watching it retrace, I was losing my cool, and that is a bad sign.

I am still a newer trader, and I am building my capital, so better to be conservative, take my gains, and build from there, not suffer a big draw down in hopes that it goes parabolic again. I wish I had bought more, but again, the size I took was inline with my risk tolerance, and as as my capital grows, I will be able to take larger positions.

The chart says its done even if my gut, and my hopes, say it has more to go. If it does, I will trade it again. I made a great trade, time to move on, and if I trade it again, I can start fresh. I had converted some of my SLV swing (entry about 2 months ago) to DGP, and will hold that for now in case PM's decide to put another leg in. SLV sure looks done on the daily, but there is a lot of emotion here in metals, so I anticipate making more trades, but they will likely be swing trades at the longest, and more likely scalps and daytrades. There is still much opportunity here, I will be watching and trading. Heck, if it keeps backing off even more today I must just have to buy back in ;)

Early winner/loser in 5g, Ericsson ERIC, Nokia NOK

I like to start collecting stock tickers for after the new year, stocks that have been beaten down and window dressed more than they deserve...