The other day I mentioned that I had missed an early entry on a trade. It was a bad day and that was a bad start. For my first trade today I took the earlier entry, and there was a good reason for it. Here’s MU:
Not only was the setup pretty good, but MU has been knocking around the bottom of my core list for ages (it’s at the bottom because it’s in danger of being relegated). So it’s a stock I’ve traded quite a lot. That means when the early entry opportunity presented itself, I had no reservations about jumping in.
As we can see from the chart, had I waited this one out the whole move would have been over and there would not have been a second chance. As it was, I was able to pull almost eight hundred dollars profit from this fifteen-minute short.
Let’s have a look at another core favourite — Tesla:
This was a bit later in the morning, and going in the other direction. It took a while for any sort of direction to emerge here. The nice thing about TSLA is that being higher priced and volatile, catching a small part of a move can yield big returns. Here I just caught the top of that long run up (because that’s how my strategy works), and that alone was enough to bag $1,200. All in about five minutes. Even if we traded a tenth the size, we’d be looking at more than a hundred bucks profit in ten minutes. Trading a tenth the size makes Tesla a twenty-dollar stock, putting it in everyone’s reach.
Having good core stocks isn’t just about always having something in the back pocket that we can pull out and trade on a slow day. Our repeated exposure to these quality stocks can give us the confidence to take trades we might otherwise pass by because we deem the risk too great. How do we build a good list of core stocks? It all starts with our trading journal. More on that in the coming days.