{"id":746,"date":"2019-12-19T04:58:52","date_gmt":"2019-12-19T09:58:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/daytradingfreedom.com\/blog\/?p=746"},"modified":"2019-12-19T04:58:52","modified_gmt":"2019-12-19T09:58:52","slug":"a-winning-trade-i-didnt-take","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/daytradingfreedom.com\/blog\/a-winning-trade-i-didnt-take\/","title":{"rendered":"A Winning Trade I Didn’t Take"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The slow descent to the holidays continues, but as battle-hardened stock traders we know there is always something out there to profit from, even in the leanest of times. Here are a couple of trades from Wednesday, one of which I did not take for reasons which will become clear…<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

First up, here’s a standard trade on EOG, though it turned into a two-biter for basically the same reason as Monday’s FB trade<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The first move didn’t really go anywhere. Rather than hang around and hope, the strategy says get out without a loss, so a humble 18 cents it was. That paid for the commissions and put a few dollars into the pot, making it easier to risk the second entry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Momentum was better on the second go, and carried the price a bit higher. Again, the exit came at the first sign of trouble. In these quieter days it’s not always easy to distinguish between the end of a move and a pause for breath, as volumes overall are lower. In the end, there was another good chance to grab even more profit from this one, but I was out by then. $600 wasn’t too shabby all things considered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here’s the one I didn’t trade. I’m posting it because it was a lovely setup and a good example of how keeping things ultra-simple can make for a profitable and low-stress strategy. The opportunity was on TSLA:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

This was a nice simple symmetrical triangle. I love triangles, they work brilliantly and they give us a good price target too. This one gave a target of around $3\/share, which wasn’t quite hit, but even trading this badly (i.e. letting it go back against us a long way before getting out), it would have been easy to net at least a dollar per share, probably more. On a thousand share position that’s obviously a thousand dollar profit, and the trade would have taken about five minutes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The other reason I liked this one was because the break of the triangle was followed quickly by a break of the previous day’s high, which is a kind of implicit support\/resistance line. A confluence of signals is greater than the sum of its parts, adding confidence to the trade. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why didn’t I take this trade if it was so great? I wasn’t looking for this setup because trades like this aren’t part of my strategy or trading plan. Had I seen it setting up, I would absolutely have taken it. But I noticed it too late because I wasn’t looking for it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I know a lot of people say Tesla is too expensive to day trade, and I understand that. But remember we don’t have to trade a thousand shares at a time. With regular margin, this trade could have been taken with a 100 share position with an account balance of $10k, and would have netted at least $100 profit in five minutes. Or it could have been traded as a spreadbet, CFD, etc. There are always ways and means.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The slow descent to the holidays continues, but as battle-hardened stock traders we know there is always something out there to profit from, even in the leanest of times. Here are a couple of trades from Wednesday, one of which I did not take for reasons which will become clear…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/daytradingfreedom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/746"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/daytradingfreedom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/daytradingfreedom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daytradingfreedom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daytradingfreedom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=746"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/daytradingfreedom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/746\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":748,"href":"https:\/\/daytradingfreedom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/746\/revisions\/748"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/daytradingfreedom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daytradingfreedom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/daytradingfreedom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}