Hey Guys,
Well in the 24 hours since my last email, the market took a huge dive and then recovered again. Yesterday at the end of trading my account was down a lot, and this morning when I woke up everything was back up again. That was a wild ride! A couple of my stoplosses were triggered yesterday during the market plunge, and then today on the recovery a bunch of profit targets were triggered.
Here are the positions that joined the parade of profit targets being hit in the last 24 hours: STX, STZ, ZS, NXPI, and MCHP for stock positions and STX and MCHP for options positions.
And we had two tickers where the price gapped up above our profit target overnight. That's pretty fun to see! STM gapped up over the profit target to my surprise, and the earnings report from ZS apparently went our way because the price opened well above my profit target. Instead of my account getting the normal 1% bump up in value from hitting the profit target on a stock position, I instead got a 1.44% bump with the ZS trade.
To be clear, a gap up is referring to the situation where there is price movement overnight outside of the stock market's normal hours, and when the market opens the price has moved up from where it closed the prior day. I just leave my normal exit orders in place, and they take care of closing the order at the higher price when the price gaps up above my take-profit price. Since swing trading involves holding positions overnight, there is always a gap risk with each trade. But that gap risk goes both ways, and today we got to benefit from the good kind of gap!
As far as new positions, in the main account I took on another futures position today and its SPXL equivalent. For those interested, it was for the MT 73 strategy listed on this page. This is the same trade strategy that I just took a stoploss on at the end of the day yesterday. It fired again, so I jumped in again. I also bought stock for ETSY and VRSN. In the extra options account I bought the options for ETSY. In the low-priced account, no trades have set up yet so there hasn't been any activity in there yet.
Guys, the market is volatile right now. There might be a lot of ups and downs in the coming days. It's a great opportunity be mindful of your emotions. I try to mentally detach from the emotions and just "feel them". It's a way of accepting them instead of avoiding them or letting them snowball. That makes it easier for me to ride the volatile ups and downs and it smooths out the ride to some degree.
If you have any questions or feedback, I'd love to hear from you.