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Friday, October 27, 2006

Not All Pain is Gain

Well this morning, I started scalping my old favourite RIM. I made 5 scalps, and wound up down in the hole $50. My thought at that time was, all that hard work went down the drain, what a waste.
Then to try and take my mind off of things, I went surfing for some finance websites (like the new Flock browser, new FF extensions, etc). While I was surfing, it occurred to me that I haven't checked my papertrading account for quite some time now. In fact, I haven't made a trade there since Sep12/06. So I go over to login to my VSE account and was curious to see what shape my portfolio was in. Crikey, it performed better than I have in the past 6 weeks !!?! This was an portfolio that was "margined" (ie. portfolio size was greater than cash available), and was left unattended for 6 whole weeks, no trades, nothing, and it still outperformed me (if you're interested, check out the "DayTraders" game in VSE, I am under phileo, ranked about 264 as of today). Boy, I hope that was a fluke, random, coincidence, because if it was NOT, then I would feel a bit discouraged. In any case, I am going to continue that experiment (pick something trendy, leave it for about 4-6 weeks, and come back to VSE and see how it does).
Then to top it all off, I had distractions at work again today, and when I came back to my desk, I found that GOOG had just tanked by about 8pts!
So why didn't I just place a Goog put buy stop order, you say? Because:
a. shorting is not my strength
b. I'm still new to daytrading options.
c. I feel even less comfortable make a short trade and not being around to watch it.

Anyways, that's how my (trading) day went today - some days you are the boxer, and some days you are the punching bag.

(UPDATE) Bought STEM @2.9about 5-10 min. before close, will post a chart later on tonite....

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