Greener pastures

After a couple weeks of ecstasy in January, the PSE has been in stuck in a rut for the most part of the 1st quarter of 2019.

Since I missed most of those plays in the early part of the year, due to either my schedule, not my setup or just plain missing them altogether, my port has hardly made a dent for now. Uptrends have been scarce and sometimes it feels like it's not worth the time to check the charts. 

Personally, I do not subscribe to the idea that good traders should be able to trade in any market condition. Especially since we always tell people to be specialists. If your specialty is on uptrends and there aren't any, then why force yourself to trade downtrends? The effort or ROI just isn't worth it.

Maybe the problem isn't you. It's the MARKET. So what can uptrend or breakout traders do?

SWITCH MARKETS.

This is exactly what I have been doing the past couple of months. The US market has beckoned and who am I to say no? The tricky part has been in finding the right balance of spending too much or not enough time in charting the US stocks. Lately though, it looks like I've been able to crack that puzzle and find that happy balance. 

Trading the US market takes a pretty big leap of faith. But they have more options for people who aren't in front of the screen the whole time. A wide variety of orders not found in the PSE. To cater for every one. Currently, my system consists of waking up 30 minutes before the end of the US trading day to look for positions to trade. So essentially buying EOD. Then just a matter of setting stops during the evening of that day (market open in the US). That's it. It takes me about an hour at most from scanning to executing trades. 

Here is my port performance since the start of the year. Not bad for a couple minutes of trading a day. Let's see if I can hit all my milestones this year. 

Time to get to work. 

* I use interactive brokers. If you want a referral send me a PM.
I could make an FAQ about the US market and my broker in the future. If I don't feel lazy.

In hibernation

It's been a while since I posted anything of note. Since it was a bear market, some time in suspended animation was much appreciated. To recharge. To decompress. To reassess and realign myself with my goals and priorities.

I highly suggest it for everyone. 

Not everything is about the grind. Taking time off to invest in yourself is PRICELESS.

Now for some updates. It's been some time so here is a bunch of them:

- The Investacup has come and gone and my final rank was at 215th. Missed out on a lot of my milestones but the good thing was my knowledge and experience trading downtrends has increased exponentially. My main goal for the competition was to have a venue to trade downtrending stocks to see if that strategy is viable in the long run. In conclusion, yes, there are numerous opportunities for downtrending plays but the risk still outweighs the reward for me. Uptrends will always have a special place in the heart of this robot.

- 2018 has come and gone and it has been the most profitable of my trading career. Sure, I gave back some gains during the last quarter but that was inevitable due to the general sentiment at that time. The thing that saved me was the mindset of protecting the profits that I already gained, managing risk and allocations. That combination went a long, long way in preventing me from squandering all my gains. So again, 2018 was a BANNER year.

- Decreased social media presence. This has been by design. There has also been a proliferation of others who have taken the mantle and continued the time honored tradition of posting snapshots and provocative quotes and other wise words. But rest assured, I'm still here trading in the sidelines as seen below. 

- Lastly, I'm currently coming up with a personal project that is fun to do. Not entirely sure what the public reaction would be. Hopefully it's something that clicks with others as well. Tentative release of it should be sometime 2nd half of 2019. Here's a sneak peek.

Investa cup Week 3-5

For the past few weeks, life has caught up to me a bit. Been busy handling some stuff for business and the little robot's school. This has caused me to lose a bit of focus on the investacup. 

Then VUL happened as well. Since it was an all time high breakout (Figure 1), I made sure to have shares in my real port as well. 

Figure 1

Everything looked ready for a good, nice uptrend. Was thinking that it could follow the ATN script where it was wicky and weak before the ATH break but after the ATH breakout it would transition into a monster. 

However, Ms Market had other plans and gave a big steaming pile of crap the next day (Figure 2) 

Figure 2

Since I was too focused on my real port during this breakdown, I made sure to sell my shares there first before even remembering my VUL shares in my investacup port. Sold most of them at the lows. Awesome job to me. YEY!

A couple of other bone headed moves trading all time lows like CHP, CLC torpedoed my ranking.

Was already thinking of calling it quits sometime during week 5, but I wanted to give it another shot. I recalled the reason why I was doing the competition, which was to grade myself against other traders while trading mostly downtrending stocks. What better way to do paper trading then during a bear market right? 

So back to the grind it was. 

The thing that most people fail to realize about trading is that it gets repetitive after some time. It's all about doing the same thing, again and again and again. You can do multiple trades using the same setup. No need to overcomplicate things. 

Case in point, this setup that presented itself with X (Figure 3). It's looked almost exactly the same to the previous two CHP trades I had. 

Figure 3

The natural progression for me after collecting data on a particular setup, is to trade it with small volume. This will help to give me a feel of the trade with real money. The ultimate goal of course, is to move from small volume to real trading with conviction volume. Conviction volume doesn't necessarily mean all ins, it just means that there is enough meat to the trade that it would justify you doing all that studying and learning for it to actually make a dent in your portfolio. Otherwise, what is the point in studying that particular setup at all? 

So anyway, X was able to boost my investa ranking again (Figure 4) but I failed to take into consideration one of the new rules in the competition. 

Figure 4

And that was you are only allowed two sells to a particular stock when it is less than PHP3 in value. Long story short, my supposed intraday bounce trade for X got stuck (Figure 5). 

Figure 5

No choice but to watch it fall and hold on. Again, even more awesome job to me! DOUBLE YEY!

Ranking after week 5. 

It should have been somewhere in the 80s if the proper cut on my current X position but that's what I get for not being too focused on the rules. So I'm back to Milestone 1. Here's to another two months of the competition.