Tuesday Wrapup (12/29) - $562 gain

A bit more activity than yesterday, but still nothing to write home about.

Faded the gap opening and that was my easiest trade in a long while.  Took not 1 tick of heat before my 1st tgt was hit.  Not nearly as pretty on the 2nd tgt, but ultimately closed for a $225 total profit.

Took a short pullback off the 1000 tick chart around 10:15 that went against me from the start.  After a 1 pt drawdown I scaled out on first opportunity for a breakeven trade.  Ultimately this one ended up being nicely profitable had I remained in the trade, but that's just how it goes sometimes.  Could've went either way.

From 11:30 to 1:30 I passed on a couple of decent countertrend setups.  Just didn't like the volume picture, and had concerns about there being enough movement to profit from this trades.  Could've probably squeezed a pt out of all these.

Finally at 1:45 there was a nice volume spike on the 3 min chart, and I got short on the first break lower off the 1000 tick chart.  Trouble with this setup was that the break took like 10-15 mins after the initial vol spike.  That should've told me something right there.  This trade was essentially a matter of entering and then sitting and waiting.  Took 30 mins after entry to break out of a 2 tick range.  Finally we moved lower and my 1st tgt was hit as volume picked up.  I sensed a low was forming, but didn't act.  On a bad move, I walked away from my computer for a few mins only to return and find that price moved back above my entry price ( I hadn't moved my initial stop).  Yeah sounds like a repeat of a trade from last week, right?  Thankfully for me we didn't travel very far. 

Ultimately I entered a new countertrend short at 3:15 as we had a decent volume spike after a higher high.  Yes, I was still short 2/3 of a position from the prior setup.  So now I'm heavy short and price starts heading up again to the tune of a 5 tick drawdown.  We temporarily take out the last high which I'm thinking the whole time is nothing more than fake out.  Sure enough we get another mini-pullback, which would've allowed me to exit at nearly breakeven on this trade.  But I didn't pull the trigger, and we move back up a bit but not above the prev high.  So now I've dug my heels in and it turns out I was right this time as price fell into the close and I scaled out of all my positions.  Ended up making $100 on the first setup and $237 on the last.  But to do so, I took on a $212 drawdown on the first, and $337 on the second.  Not good.

Definitely got sloppy there at the end.  And was very fortunate to end the day profitable as it could've easily been a $500 loss.  Need to tighten up heading into the new year.

I'll give my morning trading an A and the afternoon session a D+.  Plenty of work to be done.