Trades, Thursday 24th January 2019

Yesterday I wrote a post (7 Reasons Why You Don’t Want My Daily Stock Picks) in which I mentioned that having a good list of reliable core stocks can take some of the pressure off building a decent watch list each day. Here are two trades from Thursday that were both watch list stocks.

The first is QCOM, a stock that has been putting food onto my family’s table for more than a decade. It took two bites at the cherry to get some profit out of it. The golden rule is to never let a profit turn into a loss. The first trade started out okay but momentum petered out. Rather than hold and hope, we exit with just enough to cover the commissions. As long as we’re not losing, we can take entries all day until we get a decent one.

As it happens, the second entry was decent, and netted $300 profit in under fifteen minutes. Now it’s fair to say that a good daily stock pick can net a much bigger profit, but my point is that with a few core trades a day you can make a decent living while getting better at picking daily stocks.

My second core stock for Thursday is AAPL. This can be a volatile beast, but if you can hang on for the ride it often puts in some nice moves. Once again I scaled out of this. Taking half off early means the other half is effectively running risk-free — it’s paid for. Yes, it reduces the overall profit, but it’s worth it for the risk reduction. $575 banked in about half an hour.

To re-iterate my point then: sure, core stocks rarely put in the stellar moves that you can find in good daily picks. But these two core stocks provided $875 profit between them, all before lunch. That should be enough money to keep most traders going while they get better at picking daily stocks.