One good trade from yesterday, May 20th

I had more than one good trade but this one was the one I liked the best as I learned more from the leading trades to get to this one.

Overall I had 9 trades, 4 profitable, 5 losers. Small profits left me down for the day after commissions.

While the chart is SSO, trade one was made in SDS expecting the 200sma to act as resistance in SPX, SPY and SSO. I have the sector chart with the various sector ETF overlays and should have noted that they were wallowing in unison. Rather than playing the 200 I should have been fading from yesterday's high and the pivot (narrow blue line)low ranges. I stopped out quickly.

Trade two was a reversal play from the first, figuring that I must have been wrong the first time. I know better than to jump into a trade based on the last trade, I need to see something in the charts to justify it. I now see a few things to counter my trade, sector reversals, recent ranging...this is one of those times to wait for the trade to come to me. So I gave up and set an alert for a few cents over the pivot and a few cents under the yesterday's high and ignored the charts.

Upon hearing the alert telling me that the price has dropped to the pivot I checked the TICK and saw the nice downtrend. I waited for a TICK bar to coincide with a test of the pivot from below and entered SDS.

I had 45 minutes of waiting for this point ( I was doing other stuff though) and entered a classic breaking move. My only downfall on this trade was that I was hungry for a profit so I kept my stops tight. Although I think that would not have done any different as it was in the last hour and this time can be very volatile...best to stop tight anyway. Had I some profits to play with already I may have felt inclined to leave it some breathing room as all my indicators pointed to move of a downmove in SPX.

It is worth noting on the TICK the last spike above the red +800 line that coincided with the rally just after 1530h. I saw that and seriously considered another trade but figured I was pushing my luck this late in the day. Everything still screamed "more down to come".

I may try something different today...no price charts for the ETF that I am trading...maybe I won't actually trade them either, we'll see on that one. Run the sector overlays, the TICK, and the sector quotes...make trade decisions based on those and perhaps check the price chart and make the trade IF the others indicate first. See what I see.

Jeff.