Week 18 - Mistakes I Knew I Was Making

First of all, I have a day job. And while working, my broker is always open. I have my Amibroker as my charting software, and Google Chrome for my brokers: COL Financial & FirstMetroSec. At work, I monitor the market silently. No one knows I am doing this. 

Meet my two friends: ALT and TAB 😉

It's hard to do it simultaneously: stocks trading and doing full-time work from 8am to 6pm, Mon to Fri. My focus is divided into two. Sometimes, I really get distracted whenever my trades are not in my favor. 

So anyway, here are my trades for this week, buena-mano for the month May.

[May 2, Tues]

After my successful trade of MRC last April, I decided to give it another shot. Tuesday of May 2, I entered MRC. Conviction was consolidation at highs and near 0.480 breakout point.

MRC - 05/02/2017 closed at 0.455 up +8.3%

MRC AEP 0.450 

[May 3, Wed]

Mining sector was uptick last Wednesday, May 3. After market recess, I noticed some mining names were active. They were all green running across the ticker. I quickly made a watchlist of some mining names I know:

TAKE NOTE: MINING STOCKS WEREN'T EVEN ON MY WATCHLIST

[Between 1:30pm to 2:00pm, Wed]

I checked the charts right away, they were beautiful. Breakout candles forming everywhere. "This is amazing." I told myself, "I must not miss this move. I must ride this swing and I have to get in early. Tomorrow will be good, end of this week will be a different story."

LC, MARC and NIKL were the first to fly away. All were green, all were up +3%, +5% and even 10%+. So I said, Yeah, this is it. I should enter some mining stocks right now. 

[At 1:55 pm]

LC was 0.219 up +15.3%

MARC was 2.2 up +11.7%

NIKL was 6.98 up +5.1%

Out of 6 stocks I'm watching, I was choosing between 4 stocks: NIKL, MARC, FNI and APX. I did not entered NIKL and MARC, bec they flew already. MARC went up +11% that time. As for APX, the setup was impressive, it came from a downtrend and the bullish divergence was a great conviction.

APX was 1.66 up +4.4%

...but I hesitated. 

So I was left with FNI. 

FNI was 2.89 up +5.9%

I entered FNI instead. Seeing it breached 2.86, I bought 2 tranches at 2.93 and 2.94 around 2pm.

FNI AEP 2.935

On the other hand, I sold my MRC because it went below my entry level.

MRC selling price 0.445. Roughly around -1.1% loss.
But I said, hey, I bought the breakout of FNI! Just switched to winners!

So I went back to work after buying FNI and selling MRC. Got myself busy, and little did I know, this happened...

FNI just broke down

[At 3:00 pm]

I checked FNI, breakout wasn't successful. Too bad for me. I noticed the asking side was getting bigger. "Where did the buyers go?" The selling pressure continued, so I decided before the run-off.

I had to cut immediately. 

There you go. FNI selling price 2.77

And yep, that's around -5.6% loss incurred for the FNI trade. 

As you see, these are losing trades. These trades are not well-planned at all. 

For my MRC trade, I assumed that the next high will be broken immediately, doing another monster run. But didn't happened. 

As for my FNI trade, I am assuming the breakout will hold and continue the next day. But that didn't happened as well.

Looking back at these trades, these are the mistakes I kept on doing. Executing trades just because the stock went high and being afraid of getting left out. I was buying at the highs and selling at the breakdown. Most of my errors were impulsive trades, taking unplanned steps again & again, ending up OVER-TRADING.

Fear of missing out (FOMO) and unplanned trades can lead to failure.

I hope this will be instilled in my system. I hope someday I will learn to avoid my repetitive mistakes and just follow what's on the plan. 

More to follow.