TROPHY TRADE: PXP

Been getting a lot of PMs on how I spotted or traded this stock. 

Here are my answers in a condensed form. 

1. How do I you screen stocks? 

I answered this during the class with the Eternus batch. I usually group stocks into certain categories. Then I'll select the best ones.

This is my selection process: 

With that out of the way, I'll place that stock on my watchlist. Then I will stalk it until it shows me an optimal buy area. Usually on breakouts. 

2. Where did you buy?

This is the simplest explanation I can give without revealing the tribe's secrets. 

First buy was on the breakout here:

Second buy was somewhere here: 

3. Why did you hold?

My trade objective for this was to trend follow. So I just kept moving my stops up. 

My stop could either be the ff: 

- previous resistance that was broken

- breakdown of a box

- a set price

4. All in?

Yes. This is my trader profile and I know and accept all of the risks that could happen. If you can't take it then please DO NOT go all in. 

Lastly, the obligatory port snaps. This is the reason why this is a trophy trade for me. The gain that I got for this trade has been the biggest ever in monetary value in my whole trading career. 

As boss zee said, it might be time to level up. 

Wasn't able to take a snap of my other port. But all three of my ports had PXP. The last port reached only about 80+% up at the highest. 

Take note though, this port snapshot was taken at the end of 09/25. I was not able to sell at the highs. But that is alright with me. It is the risk I am willing to take since I am doing trend following. 

It's all about setting expectations. And with that I always remember this quote: 

"As long as you accept the fact that you will never be able to sell at the highs, you will be fine."

Again my eternal gratitude to my mentors, Zee and Kap. Along with all the other mentors who push me to be the best trader I can be. 

A Tale of 2 Traders: SSI

This is a story of two traders who bought a stock. This story is completely true. The names have been changed to protect the identity of the buyers. 

Once upon a time there was a stock IPO. This certain trader, YP, loved the fundamentals of the stock. He thought the owners were reputable people and their name recall would carry their stock to the moon. YP knows Alpha is a technical trader, though has no idea that Alpha is ZFT trained. 

We begin our story sometime in back in July or August of 2015, YP would ask me from time to time what I thought of SSI. 

iAOTS with no sign of support

When it went back to the IPO price. I said, sell.

When it went to 6. I said SELL.

When it went to 5. I said SELL.

When it went to 4. I finally asked, why are you asking me for my advice if you're not going to listen? The chart is telling me there is no support or reason to buy yet. 

The only thing that he said was that he's already in too deep and would rather just become an investor. He still believes in the owners. That the owners won't let the stock be down for long. 

Fast forward to now, about a year and a half since that time. Finally, SSI looks to be showing some signs of strength. Slowly it seems to be on the long road to recovery. 

By my rough estimate, YP's average should be somewhere around 7-9 pesos. So from about a 60-80% loss, it should be now down to about 40-50%. Not bad. (Pardon my math, despite being a robot and a trader my math is very very bad)

As for me, I bought SSI using nothing but charts and was able to be up by a good amount. The road to breakeven for him is still ongoing. If ever it gets there for him, I'd like to believe that I'll be there cheering him on since I would have made another entry for SSI.

I hope that this story could be used as a sort of caution for people to stop loving a stock. Because it might be too late for some to realize that stocks won't love you back. 

Reaching for the moon: ALCO

For this year I've set very aggressive monthly targets as my quota. I wanted to see just how near to those targets I can get. I knew it was a challenge since the bar was set really high. 

Thinking of the targets reminds me of a quote I heard a long time ago. Something that has resonated with me ever since. 

It's stuck with me since it meant to always, always, ALWAYS set your goals high. For even if you fail to reach your goals, the effort that it took to try and reach those goals will still bring you a long way from where you started. 

Going back, this year, I've set my quota to be 25% a month. With the power of compounding interest, that should bring my port to an all time high by the 3rd quarter of the year. At first, I thought it was daunting but the universe seems to be telling me otherwise. 

How else can I explain the fact that with just 3 winning trades, I've reached DYM status in record time. 

Quality over quantity I'd like to think. 

I love Excalibur

So my 2017 has been off to a roaring start. Already about a third of the way to reaching my yearend goal. Hopefully I get to catch more monster plays. 

Trend Following: LIHC

Trend following. You hear or read it often but ever wonder how it is done? 

Let me try to give a short walk-through on how my neural networks implement a trend following trade. I will be using my latest trade, LIHC as an example. 

The first thing to remember in doing a trend following trade is to watch your entry point or your average price (AEP). The ideal entry is to get in before or right at the start of the trend. How to do that? Read up on the boss's blog about ZS and AOTS. For LIHC, this was easy to spot since it also coincided with a multi year breakout. 

Next comes the hard part. The holding time. 

To get a better idea, watch this. These are the survivor endurance challenges. Where you have to outlast your competition for the chance of a bigger prize. 

For this example, the contestants have to hold their arms up or else they will get splashed with paint. The host can tempt them with some small reward in exchange for stopping out. Or if they get tired, they can just put down their arm. 

To put this in perspective, the rewards or the exhaustion of a person could be compared to someone selling at a certain target price or resistance. 

Or maybe if the chart or price action looks weak. There is nothing wrong with selling at those points. As long as you follow your plan then go ahead. 

For me, I do not set target prices. I'd rather set trail stops. If the price goes down a certain point then that is when I sell. That point could be a previous resistance turned support, the previous close, a MA getting broken. It doesn't matter that I wasn't able to sell at the top. The important thing is I was able to ride the bigger move. 

Another thing to consider when doing trend following trade is fighting the urge to move to the flavor of the day or the week. Like the bear in the GIF below, it's human nature to want to sell and then move to the faster moving stock. For this LIHC trade, there were several missed trades, CPG, BLOOM, FNI, STI, PPC, WEB to list a few. 

But in reviewing my past trades, it was my inactivity that has given me bigger gains. Focusing on just a few trades a month has helped me to reach my quota or targets. My system is not really built for tsupita trades. That mindset or strategy has yielded a bad win/loss ratio over time. The losses negate the wins or just at breakeven. Plus the added mental stress of having to look for good trade setups everyday. 

In reality, I am lazy. I'd rather make just a couple of trades a month then to trade multiple times a day/week. This fits more to my trader profile right now as well since I cannot be in front of the computer the whole day anymore. 

screenshot date was close of 11/25/2016

Not bad for a one month hold don't you think? One trade for the whole of November. Do take note, actual selling was below 1.5 today 12/2/2016. Wasn't paying too much attention to the movement since I was busy doing other things.