I didn’t do a weekly analysis yesterday, so I’m just diving in today. I “plan” to swing trade, so I’m fine with letting the market breathe for a little bit before I get started, but I didn’t want it to be this much. Oh well, can’t go back in time, so let’s see what opportunities I can find here.
Equities pushed down at the open, but so far have been pushing back up on the day, taking out yesterday’s highs. Price had a recent peak at the beginning of the month, but pulled back until last week; where it’s been strong since Friday. We’re not quite at those highs yet, but overall the market appears to be trending upward. There’s some resistance that the S&P is coming up to now, but I’d expect it to break this level if it’s going to continue the trend — the main issue would be when. I’ll look mainly for longs today, because things look strong
Well, instead of looking at charts, I looked at Reddit for 30 min. I’m going to try to get back to it now, and here’s hoping I find something I like.
MSFT – this has been pushing up all year, and while it had a fairly large drop last week, it just dropped to some support/prior resistance and has pushed up over the last couple of trading days. Today, price is up near the highs, and while it’s struggling to hold on to the gains, it could run if it breaks the swing high from last week. I’ll set an alert to let me know if/when price gets closer to that level, but looking right now, it’s not great
NET – This is up quite a bit on the day, and it took out a pretty strong resistance area that’s held up the last couple of weeks. When I first added this to my list, price had taken out those highs, but was hovering back near the resistance area — I thought it might provide a good entry. Unfortunately, price has since pushed back up to the highs of the day and that’s at a pretty strong resistance level from back in August/September. If this makes a tradable move around this key level, it might be good, but I don’t see that happening today
BA – Boeing goes on and off of my watch-list, and today it looks promising. It’s been pushing up since last October, but for nearly all of 2023 so far, price has moved sideways. Over the last week or so, though, price has been staying near the highs of the range and today, price took out those highs. Since then, price has pulled back and is sitting near those highs again, but that could be the entry opportunity for the next push up. I think this is where I’m going to put my focus today, but I’ll glance at the other charts, still
XOM – This has largely been pushing up since last July (one of the only things that I’ve looked at lately that’s been pushing up for this long… shocking it’s an oil company), and has been quite strong since December. Last Friday, price made a nice spike and reached new all-time highs. Over the last couple of days, price has pulled back some, and is retesting a level from the end of last month/beginning of this one, and if price can bounce off of this level, it could make for a great long. Hell, if I was in a position to trade Options, I’d definitely take a shot here, but since I can’t, I’m going to set an alert near the breakout level, and see if I can find a good opportunity when/if price get’s to that level.
End of Day
I looked at BA on the 4h and hourly charts, and largely saw a huge spike to take out those highs, followed by a huge spike back down to the prior high area. Thinking that this was a strong candidate, I looked at the 15 min. chart, and saw, essentially, what I saw on the higher time-frames, but this had the beginnings of a rally forming as well — someplace I could see entry and exit points.
I ran the numbers, and the R:R was exactly 2, and that was a break of the day’s high and a push up to the next resistance area. I didn’t love that, so I hesitated. I wasn’t sure about the move for one and price was already really close to my entry, so I didn’t actually put in any entry orders.
I ended up drawing lines in TradingView to see what may have happened if I did trade it, and shortly after price would’ve triggered my entry, price pulled all the way back again and took out my would-be stop.
A couple things about this:
1) I can’t really say that my stops are being hunted when this looks like a “hunted stop loss”, but it wasn’t a trade I was actually in. Maybe/probably that’s a level where there were a lot of orders and the market makers — or maybe even better traders — got their entries filled on “our” stop-loss exits.
I’ve read about this before, and recently come across a video that addresses this, so I need to figure out how to more consistently be on the winning side of those moves, as I often find myself either losing on those moves or breaking even at best.
2) I mentioned this a bit prior, but to really drive the point home: price, almost immediately after triggering my would-be stop-loss, rallied again and reached the roughly 1R. I definitely need to figure out how to be on the right side of these moves, and the strategy I practiced with AMZN and SHOP last week is the strategy needed to capture it. The downside is that I ended up losing the SHOP trade and (I think) I’m still in the AMZN trade and it’s down — I should consider selling it and cutting my losses, but I’ll cross that bridge later.
All in all, I’m clearly on the right path, I just have to keep practicing the new strategy and looking for opportunities that make sense within it. It looks like the best options will be stocks on the more volatile side on the day. That’s something I’ll look for (hopefully) tomorrow.