Today, I received a morning slap from a failed Nasdaq buy signal on the daily chart.
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The index opened with a higher high, so I put QLD, the Ultra long QQQ Proshares ETF on my main radar.
The plan was to buy over the 5-minute high of the day, or a pullback buy signal. The signal triggered on the 4th candlestick giving me a risk R = .35. A stop was placed at 83.75. The current low was 83.75, and I didn’t want to set it under that. I figured there would be nothing holding up the ETF once it broke. That didn’t matter, and I started the day with close to a 2R loss with the slippage I received on the fill. It happens.
I see they closed the Nasdaq on the 50dma. I won’t even attempt to guess it’s direction.
Day trading ZOLL was a better experience. Off my watch list, ZOLL – ZOLL Medical Corp., triggered a buy when the stock broke the 5-minute high. With the market in pain, a tight stop under the small base made sense. It was either going to start moving, or I would be out. A trailing bar stop method worked well in this trade. ZOLL still looks good, but I’m not in.
SWIR stopped me out last week, and proceeded to immediately reverse back up. Today provided another entry over the last daily candlestick’s high. I should probably give this room down to 13, but the stop is under the pivot low, and 20-day moving average for now.
I doubled up on RYL today. The stop loss moves to today’s daily lows for TOL and RYL. I may tighten down to a smaller time frame depending on how the homebuilder stocks act.
