My first week of trading didn’t end up with me bankrupt… which is nice. I actually turned in a profit of just about 2.3% on my TD Ameritrade account, beating the market by ~3% on a couple of trades. Here are my trades for the week:
I bought 150 C @ 3.9 and 200 more @ 3.6999 averaging down to about 3.79 PPS (Price Per Share) on Tuesday. I figured that C is worth over $4 in the short term, and the pullback in the market was a good time to get in. I was right. Once it got over $4, I got a little too conservative and put in a stop loss order at $4.01. Of course, C shot right back up after I sold my shares and never dropped that low again all day. Still walked away with $48.51 profit after commissions. Commissions cut my profits by over 38%… I gotta start trading higher volumes.
My second trade of the week was actually a mistake. I subscribed to Timothy Sykes‘ TIM Alerts this week (more on that later). On Thursday he recommended shorting MNI if broke through some “technical support” @ $2. Somehow I misread the alert and I decided to buy 450 shares @ $1.9899. Luckily the market was on my side and I was able to get out on Friday with a small profit after commisions of $7.03. Holding the stock overnight, after I had realized I had made a mistake, probably wasn’t a great idea… I just didn’t want a loss.
Moving forward, I want to get into short selling stocks. Brokers require clients to be on margin trading to short sell, so I have been waiting for that to be enabled. I am debating adding some more cash to the account as well so I can have more leverage without the risk of buying on margin.
Goal for the next week is a 5% increase. If I continued increasing profits 5% ever week on my account balance, in a years time I would be up $28k. Piece of cake, right?
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