Context

Stock market up from strong jobs report. Ongoing Middle East conflict a ticking bomb. US Docks strike done.

Plan

Exit $FDX trade asap. US Docks strike tailwind is gone, I know nothing about the company and I have no idea where this is going from here. Yes, it will wipe out most of the recent earnings, but it can get worse.

I’m behind reflecting on the last 2 days and my experience in the last two days has been humbling. Coupled with the SMB Capital videos I’ve watched and the lessons from The Daily Trading Coach book, I’m going back to what worked last month, trade only the SPX, and if I miss-time it, leave the position there.

Execution

FDX

Exited position, as planned, but soon after market opened instead of pre-market. My new rule was to only trade after 10am-10:30am as they recommend. The outcome of being somewhat eager was positive, I could have increased my loss significantly.

Why did I sell? The more I looked at the major factors I had in mind around this name, the more uncertain I felt about holding on to the name, and at some point the voice shouting “sell as soon as you lose conviction” was too strong.

MU

Early 0.38% win, I correctly identified an uptrend, but then I was wrong with the second entry and I violated my rule of setting stop losses for every buy, then I panicked as the price kept coming down, bought more because “the whole situation is positive, soft landing, no strike, the Middle East shouldn’t affect a microchip company,” I stuck around praying that the price would go up enough and then sold. Could have made a sell at 0.3% profit, but could have also ended up lower 0.70%.

The most important lesson is that I have a lot of discipline work to do, and a lot of practice to do.

Illiquid micro cap

Bought more shares at the same price that I bought early in the week. Business is undervalued, little downside risk. Company is doing >5x the revenues it was doing in 2020, and it’s being trading up from this support level and then back down every year in the last 4 years.

VOO

This is what I’m somewhat reliably able to do for now. Stick to it while I develop stronger pattern recognition. And I still have all the VOO bought at $526.33.

Good first entry point and inflection point reading, although I could have done better had I been less greedy and set the SELL order at 0.3%, not ~0.4%.

Second entry point was less clean, a bit too impatient. The exit point was predetermined, like the first, because I wasn’t in front of the screen. Worked well but also there was a macro tailwind.

Observations

Working well

• Journal: this is a game changer, keep doing it and don’t worry about introspection quality for now, first build the habit. The Daily Trading Coach is worth its tiny cost in gold. It’s helped me clearly see that my risk management when it comes to investing is unacceptable.
• Meditate: started back meditating regularly, just 15 min a day doing vipassana. I believe it helped me a lot to be more aware during the week, even if I didn’t stop the mental habits of “I’m not going to trade today […] (5 min later) What the fuck am I doing trading this again? I just lost money on it?!”
• Keep learning from others: SMB Capital videos are very helpful, their sales material is horribly pushy, especially the “Free webinar,” but don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Do Differently

• Process change: No single stock day trading until I’ve done 100 full day reps on them.
• Process change: Consolidate my trading and investing journaling notes in one place and be consistent, otherwise I miss patterns and I increase friction at review time.