Hey Guys,
This morning I bought stock positions in BIDU and CE in my main account. And I grabbed the options for BIDU and FXI in my extra options account. I also bought MPC and COP in my low-priced account. And even with all that activity, there are still a lot of stocks getting picked up by my scan. I anticipate plenty more trades coming up the pipeline in the coming weeks.
I had a couple of stock positions reach their time limits this morning, so I closed those (KMI in the main account and CF in the low-priced account). Both got closed for a loss.
With KMI, though, today is the ex-dividend date, which means that anyone who owned the stock overnight automatically will be receiving the dividend. And it's a pretty healthy one of 0.27 per share (which is about 15% of our profit target). So that cuts the loss in half. If you did own the stock overnight (meaning as of the end of regular trading hours yesterday and at the time the opening bell rung this morning), then no action is needed on your part to receive the dividend. It most likely will automatically be credited to your account in the coming weeks.
Yesterday my stock position for H hit its profit target. And my RNG options also hit their profit target.
Overall, in the last few weeks, my stock trades have not exhibited a strong win ratio. That is certainly one of the challenging aspects of trading: sticking with the program even when the short term results aren't generating solid profits. It can be especially difficult when the market as a whole is going up. Since I know I'm making my trades in lock step with back tests, I sometimes like to remind myself of what the back tests showed over time. In back tests, the win rate over decades was around 57%. My win rate on stock trades in the last few weeks has been below 50%. To me that signals that at some point in the future, there might be a nice win streak coming that puts our overall win rate closer to the long term rate. Of course there's no guarantee of it, and that's part of the risk involved with trading. But I've lived through this type of thing before with Mindful Trader, where there are periods of "scuffling" and then other periods of booming profits that pull up the win ratios. The challenge is that you never know for sure when the profit booms are coming! That's why I stick to the plan and keep taking each back-tested trade that sets up.
If you have any questions or feedback, I'd love to hear from you.