Wiiiiipe-out!
Waaaa-howwwww. What a crazy week this has been.
And by crazy I mean — seriously lame.
With 3 stocks stopping out and 2 heading that way — all I can say is thank God Good Friday took me out of the game!
Wow.
And to make matters worse, $GPRC stopped me out one day — and then gapped open +50% the very next day.
That’s why I always agree with the axiom:
“Winners take care of themselves, it’s the losers you have to manage.”
Nothing could be more true. Gotta manage those losers. Make sure they don’t get to you. Know beforehand about all of the possible ways you will be stopped out, faked-out and thrown out of the market.
Those things are always going to happen.
The trick is to stay focused on the big picture. Meaning –
- Am I making money over time?
- Am I following my rules?
- Am I cutting losses short?
- Are my winners bigger than my losers?
- Am I following strong money management rules
These are all things that keep us in the game. Keep us alive to hunt for new opportunities.
Because seriously, the stock market isn’t a kiddie pool. There’s no shallow end. And you don’t get floaties.
Coming into this week, the watchlist had been up 7 out of 10 weeks — nice! But this week was proof positive that you cannot get satisfied with returns — or think you’ve got it made — or think you know what’s coming next — or that returns are going to continue indefinitely. Because they don’t.
Ever.
You constantly have to be watching your system, checking your method and checking yourself!
Anyway — here are last week’s stats:
Yep -- this hurts!
Ouch. Not good.
I’m definitely thinking the market is heading into correction territory here.
Why?
Because so many of the small cap and micro caps were getting hammered. And definitely the ones I was in.
Still, others were rocking — and that’s not fun either — seeing other stocks taking off while yours are crashing and burning.
Yep, just another thing you have to get used to in the market.
Market Charts
As usual, each week I look at the general market as represented by the S&P500 to gain an insight as to what the market as a whole is doing right now. Not what it’s going to do. Not where it’s going to go. But where it is. This allows me to act accordingly.
With that said, here are the hourly, daily and weekly charts and what I see there:
Hourly Chart
As you can see — we closed under the 50 MA on the hourly chart. This does not bode well for short term traders. I’m keeping my eye on that consolidation area to see which way we break — and if we’re able to pop back up over the moving average.
Daily Chart
Moving up to the daily chart I see a couple pretty serious fakeouts and an approaching area of support. If it holds, great, if not — watch out below.
Weekly Chart
The weekly chart is looking pretty weak to me. I don’t see a lot of volume on this push to highs and the last few bars don’t show any signs of strength.
I’m starting to feel that next week is going to be pretty pivotal.
More Info:
For complete watchlist stats (over 60 trades now) check out this spreadsheet. As always, a new watchlist comes out every Sunday night. I will be doing this for a year. Then I’ll see what happens.
I’m also keeping track of a few other methods. You can read about those here.
For more about how I trade, check out Breakouts for Beginners, or Trend Analysis For Beginners.
As always, a new watchlist comes out on Sunday Night.
This post was written by...
David John Hall – who has written 200 posts
David has been trading non-stop for 6 years. He lives in Redondo Beach, California (an awesome place to live) and is super stoked to be able to blog about his passion here.
