Daily real update, AEM daytrade

Today I placed my first cash trade since starting my day trading trial with AEM about three weeks ago. In my fake portfolio I got a little over 23% return for the 14 trading days. I consider that a very good return as it is a 1.64% daily return based on $5,000 starting capital. 1% per day is a good return as well and is my initial goal.

Here is most of the chart for today, the part that has the good trading moves anyway.

The lower pivot points were the important ones today. top red line is R1, the light blue is the primary pivot point then green are S1, 2, and 3 in descending order. The price barely broke above the PP, then bounced briefly off the S1, broke cleanly through S2, bounced off of S3 then hovered about the S2. Real nice trading moves and most of them occured before noon. The price did make it back up to S1 for about a minute right near the end of the day before dropping nearer to the S2 at the close.


I placed two shorts near the start, 1006h and 1023h for 22 cents and 44 cents per share gains, small moves but I was anticipating the drop that ended up happening so I was considering those intra-day positioning trades. I actually placed a short right at the 1030h mark where the nice consolidation was coming to an apex and the price just broke out to the downside nicely...perfect entry and would have grabbed the 80 cent drop. What happened was the connection to the ECN dropped at the broker and my short never got through...it was a limit so it would not have gotten executed at all by the time that the connectin was back up. I was really ticked and had to take 10 minutes to cool down in order to not trade under the influence of negative emotions.

The thing that I was most concerned about was, had the order been received and executed and the price jumped up I would not have been able to close the trade so the downside might have been a loss that I had no control over. I would rather a missed trade than a missed exit, at least missing the trade is a break even proposition.

Once the price bounced off of the green S1 support line I lost confidence in the down trend. I never got back in until the very bottom turned on the S3 line so I entered a long for a 51 cent per share gain. The price of gold was coming up by this point so it was a fairly high probability trade supported by the Global index that I use as well.

All in all not a bad day, 2.18% portfolio return even considering the missed opportunities.

Worth noting. Seeing as my portfolio is down to about $4,000 after all of my testing and goofing around I have restarted with $4K as my initial working capital. The $1000 loss is far less than the commissions incurred during the last 7 months, so I can't complain...especially as I blew $300 just trying out market orders to determine how fast they would get executed at the very start of the market. I'll restart the side bar stats soon as well.

Also worth noting, even though fake trading this as if I had money on the line it is always different when the money is actually there. A couple of times a hesitated when I shouldn't have, but there will always be other trades so once I realized my mistkae I did not jump ahead in. Take a breath and check to see that the indicators are all still good THEN make the trade. This difference will pass as I get ore trades under my belt.

Jeff.