Again, in hindsight, I could see the argument that this is extended, but what am I supposed to do? I have to trade things that look extended in one way or another, I think.. There won’t be much discernible trends without moves that look extended. I think that’s just how it is.
This, while looking somewhat extended on the higher time frames, was up against some resistance on the day and hadn’t pushed out of that area yet. Again, with the overall market being up, I was looking for longs, and this sitting near resistance looked good to me.
Entry – $17.74
Target – $18.00
Stop – $17.66
R:R – 3.25
Entry – $17.74
Dropping down to the 3 minute chart, I saw a clear breakout of some consolidation, then a retest of the highs of that consolidation period. It was a clean retest in my opinion, so I put an entry order in.
Exit – $17.77
Price pushed in my favor, but hovered near my entry for a while. It pushed up near 1R once, but pulled back slightly. Since it hadn’t pulled back to near my stop, I left it alone. Eventually, price did hit 1R, so I moved my stop to break even. I was able to follow along and get a couple of pennies of profit, following the SAR on the 3 min. chart, before price reversed and stopped me out for a small gain.
Overall, I’m happy with this trade, too, maybe happier with this one than the last one even though this was the smaller winner. I had at least 3 points of evidence pointing toward the upside, I paid attention to what the market was doing and took trades in that direction, and I really don’t think I tried to follow breakouts, I took the second breakout of the day, not the 3rd or 4th like I sometimes have in the past.
There are a couple of things that I’d like to try to implement/do better I.E. Using the retest area as my entry rather than my stop and continuing to get to the computer around 8 so I can setup the day better (similarly to today), but I’m happy with the things I did today and the progress I feel like I’ve made.
I can’t do any more day trading this week, but I’d like to trade more, so as I mentioned earlier, I need to re-visit swing trading stocks as well as longer-term buy-and-hold strategies. That’s neither here nor there, though, just be happy with what was accomplished today!