Once again, I did a weekly setup analysis on Monday, so when I took this trade on Tuesday morning, I didn’t have anything specifically written up for it. Here’s what I saw on Monday:
This was mostly down for the first and third quarters of last year, with mostly sideways movement/lots of choppiness during the middle 6 months of the year. Since the beginning of this year, price has been pushing up strong — similar to the overall market. Not counting last Friday, over the last week+ price has largely moved sideways.
But on Friday, price made a nice push up and broke the highs of that base and putting price into the middle of the range it was in for several months last year. This morning, price has pulled back, and is appearing to retest the base it was in for the prior week. That retest looks really good to me, and I see room to the next resistance area; though there could be some chop in there. I really like the last month’s price action, so I’m keeping it on my list, but it’s the movement before that that’s giving me pause. I’ll revisit tomorrow and see if I can find an entry point
I looked at this chart again Tuesday morning before the market opened, and it still looked promising. On the hourly chart, the pullback from Monday stalled right at a level that was just a strong resistance area a few days prior. I figured with the stall at such a strong level, if price could push back up, it would do so convincingly.
I set an entry order to trigger if this pushed up above a minor resistance area that was created on Monday during the small pullback.
Entry – $58.05
Entry – $58.00
Target – $62.50
Stop – $56.00
R:R – 2.25
Price opened strong, and quite quickly at the open triggered me in to the trade. Things looked good, but fairly slow. With the slow movement, I decided to be a little more aggressive and move my stop to break even around .5R rather than 1R; which price had gotten close to once but didn’t quite touch.
EXITÂ – $58.06
Eventually, price made another push up, taking out another minor resistance area, so I moved my stop to break even at that point. Near the end of the day, price seemed to stall a bit, and I noticed a bit of a pullback forming. It was a small one in the overall context of the day being up, so I thought it was a great sign for the open the next day. I left everything how it was and went and made lunch with ~30 min. before the close.
As I was standing in the kitchen, I heard the ThinkorSwim trade confirmation sound, suggesting I was triggered out of the trade. Sure enough, price came back just enough right at the end of the day to stop me out at basically break even (technically, one penny in profit).
I can’t think of anything here where I did anything wrong. Looking today (Wednesday) price is still hovering right around my entry point from yesterday, but hasn’t made a drastic down-move at all, either. It’s still well above my original stop level; just another case of mistiming a trade.
I may have been able to squeeze a couple more pennies out of this if I had set an entry point closer to the prior resistance area, with my stop being somewhere below that — it would offer me a closer 1R, and I wouldn’t have to fudge my rules to get in profit, but I think that would also leave me a bit more prone to fakeouts. Something I’ll have to experiment with.
The only other thing that would make me more successful, that I can think of, is to be able to put out several orders in charts that look like this one did. Once that’s the case, one or two slow-moving/break even/1R losses won’t be that big of a deal because it’ll be likely that something that I put an order in to will have a nice pop, and it’ll pay for the rest. But that’s not something I can just do next time; it’ll come when it comes. In the meantime, I need to just keep swimming and making the best decisions I can!