Today I was trading USO, but didn’t see the markets turn negative. You can see from chart below that the USO tracks the wider market closely. See the comparison lines!

Lesson is to always have DOW, S&P, and NASDAQ on screen to look for a turn in market. There were clear sell signals. I should have sold my USO Calls when I saw the market turn from Bull to Bear! Don’t own CALLS in a Bear market! Nevertheless, I still made 40% on the trade, as the market recovered the next day (in at $0.5800, out at $0.8400 = 44.82%0. Let us review what happened.

I need to have a calendar of FOMC meetings and releases to avoid this in the future. Look at the screenshot below, how the market turned when the FOMC minutes (negative catalyst) were released!

The sell off was sudden and harsh…

Luckily, overnight (I held overnight) there was a recovery in USO, and I was able to sell for over 40% profit. Perhaps I should give myself more credit – I bought a stock that was clearly in a weekly/daily uptrend, that also had positive new catalysts. Perhaps I was not so lucky, just a little bit early.

Today I wanted to share a recent options trade I made, that while successful, could have generated much more profits if I was more patient on my entry, and paid less for the put options. Let me explain…

The catalyst of the this short trade was a failed FDA approval. I predicted a lot of selling pressure. I bought a PUT option (strike 30) for about 8 days out expiry. However, I was so excited to make the trade, that I bought the options at the worst possible time. I rushed the entry, and overpaid by about 2$ per option! Because of this, despite being correct on my thesis and watching the underlying stock decline in price, I was mostly in the red for this trade. Truth be told, I was very happy with how I exited the trade – I waited at watched all the correct indicators to signal a good opportunity to sell.

However, despite selling at the best possible time, I only made a small profit – whereas, if I had bought the options at any other time during the 1.5 days I held them, I would have made hundreds of dollars more! So the lesson (again, unfortunately!) is the be more patience with my entries!

Mistake: Lack of patience with entry.

Trade: Short via put options []

Ticker: RETA (DEC17 21 30 PUT)

Entry: $2.750

Exit: $3.100

Today was a mess. I didn’t read my emotions correctly, and ended up making multiple mistakes which cost me dearly. Let me explain…

My trade started with a pre-market purchase of EFOI.

So I bought in at $3.48 pre market and was happy with the entry as price action soon went above ~$3.70 and stayed above there for a while when the market opened. Then, I added to that position immediately saw a green 1m candle and I rather too quickly closed out my position for a small gain.

Because of my small position size (note: I’ve been trading smaller position size recently which has been going well and allows me to manage my trades with less emotion), I only made a small gain (regret and greed kicked it).

I also sold too early, due to a lack of Fib planning. So I began to build my first mistake which was fear of missing out (FOMO kicking in as additional green candles filled).

Because I was annoyed that I had sold too early I had not done my Fibonacci is correctly (note: I use Questrade and Fib extension tool does not work well inside of Questrade), I irrationally flipped to another stock LEXX on my watchlist and immediately enter the trade without any research just a few seconds of price action monitoring in level two.

This was a rash mistake which of course did not work out. After a few minutes of watching the stock consolidate I exited through small loss.

At this point I was obviously emotionally charged so when I went back to my original chart of EFOI, with revenge trading plus fear of missing out and a very heightened emotion state – I then proceeded with re-entry even though I knew price action was over extended an overbought. To make up for my losses, on the new trade I entered with a large size.

After consolidating sideways for a few minutes I knew that it was going to drop in price because it had a few failed tops but with a manual stop I waited a little bit too long and exited the trade eventually for a larger loss.

This loss wiped out my daily gains and some.

And so today’s lessons are about poor trading FOMO, revenge trading, two large position size, lack of planning and preparation, impulse trading.

There’s nothing much else to be said other than I let myself down today with very poor emotional trading where I made a number of mistakes in quick succession and of course the result was a loss for the day so this will be a blog post that I remember for a while I think this is the worst trading I’ve done in about 14 days and so I really want to remember this.

Mistakes:

1. Lack of Fib extension, target price planning on 1st trade.
2. FOMO as I left money on the table on 1st trade.
3. Greed on 1st trade.
4. Lack of planning on 2nd trade.
5. Revenge trading on 2nd trade.
6. Revenge trading on 3rd trade.
7. Over trading on 2nd and 3rd trade.
8. Too big position size on 3rd trade

Hello everybody my name is Julian with TraderMedic.com and today I just wanted to go over a nice long trade i made this morning on u.s oil this ticker symbol USO.

I made a nice 20.8 percent gain in just a few minutes and so I just wanted to go over how the trade came about how i managed the trade how I exited the trade and any lessons learned.

So as you can see the chart on the screen December 7th showing one minute chart – I entered at about two minutes in when i saw a lot of buying volume and i pretty much followed the one minute chart the whole way there was a little point there where it dipped a little bitand luckily did not trigger my mental stop which was the bottom of that second long green candle and then you can see it rallied up to almost 52 dollars just a little shy of that and as you can see in the yellow at the top of the screen, I had a December 10th $51.5 dollar calls, and so we were sitting above that and so I was really happy uh with the trade – I generally just trade the first hour maybe hour and a half of each day because i have commitments at 900 a.m currently, so I was happy to get out of the trade, however it did rally a little bit higher during the day but i was off working on other things so that was the kind of trade.

Also, I thought I would also just show the five minute chart here.

So let me just bring that up so you can see on the five minute chart. There was that extra that extra run it had, so i guess if i was able to trade a little past nine PST then i might have exited (although again it didn’t hit my stop yet) so probably it would have been good just to sit in there a little bit but if i had exited or maybe i would just add to my position as it breaks that kind of what is it $52mark – that would have been a nice little bit of extra trading that i could have one there.

So i think i made kind of half the move basically which again i think is okay for somebody who trades first hour first hour and a half but ideally i would have made that extra part too, so maybe that’s the lesson learned from today but overall i was happy with the trade.

Also, the market was pretty green today as it was rebounding from perhaps overblown Omicron virus fears – so this was kind of the second green day for the market in a row, so i was confident to have that behind me as well that most of the market was green today and oil was already up in the pre-market a couple percent.

So yeah happy with this trade USO, and i’ve done well on this ticker before i’ll keep this in my watchlist for sure!