Practice Trade
This was another candidate for my new strategy, but I wanted to take a stab at day-trading this, so I ended up setting a limit order in my practice account based on the 3 minute chart. Here are my notes from this morning:
This has been pushing up since the beginning of the year, quite strongly, save for a fairly sizable pullback in the last week of January. Since then, though price has been pushing back up and has taken out the highs it made prior to that drop. When I first added this to my list, it appeared to be retesting those highs, so I liked it, but looking now and it’s already pushing back up. I’ll come back here if I don’t see any entries anywhere else, but I think I missed this
After triggering my entry, price nearly hit my stop, but ended up rallying from there and reached 1R. I moved my stop to break-even at that point; but knowing that this was a practice trade and I had a live trade out there too, I decided to enter a trailing stop, in case I completely stopped paying attention to this.
Entry – $18.00
Target – $18.50
Stop – $17.90
R:R – 5
Entry – $18.00
Exit – $18.07
I don’t know how quickly after entering the trailing stop it triggered, but it was pretty quick. I hate using trailing stops, and this is why. I only did it in this case because I wasn’t sure how closely I was going to monitor this trade, but I need to treat practice trades like real trades going forward — there’s going to be times where I’m managing 3 – 4 trades at a time, so I need to be prepared for that. I could’ve done it, I was mostly lazy.
Another thing: I came back to this chart a little after this trade closed and there was a bullish ascending triangle forming around the day’s highs, which was a fairly strong key level. I liked it enough that I ran the numbers to trade it in my actual account, but by the time I got back to the chart to enter the order, price had already pushed past my entry.
I put alerts in TradingView to let me know when/if price hit 1R, which it did; then I set one to let me know about the target being hit, which also happened. I missed this trade. Some factors why: I don’t feel comfortable putting multiple orders out there — especially when day-trading — because I’m subject to FINRA rules. Comes back to account size. I also wasn’t looking at this to break out after having taken a practice trade here, but that makes sense. I don’t want to revenge trade or anything like that, so I often just let my losses go and revisit later for the write-up.
Honestly, I don’t think I really messed anything up with missing this trade, other than being a little slow. Even if I hadn’t traded this earlier, there’s no guarantee I would’ve gotten to this and ran my numbers in time to get into the trade where I wanted to still. I just need to keep working through my process, keep honing my skills and building confidence. I won’t miss these trades (at least not as often) when I can put out as many orders as I want and not have to worry about breaking any legal rules. Time will tell. Just keep swimming.