My Trades on 1 April 2008

Starting from today, I will post all my trades with number of shares and my Profit/Loss in blog. I will also put the reason I got into, and how I can improve from the trades. From there, I believe I can be more disciplined, stick to my rules and become more careful before getting into any trades.

Trades	Number of Shares	Position	Gross P&L/share	Gross P&L
CA	500	Long	0.04	20
DFS	500	Long	-0.11	-53
DIS	500	Long	0.07	35
F	1500	Short	0.05	-75
GM	1000	Short	-0.02	-21
GPS	500	Long	-0.19	-95
LOW	500	Long	0.13	65
NCC	400	Short	0.09	37
NOK	500	Short	-0.28	-140
PIR	500	Long	-0.10	-49
T	500	Long	-0.19	-95
Total	6900			-371

1. One of my colleagues was calling that Nokia was hitting Low and another said that in 5 minutes charting, NOK is very far away from 144 moving average. So it might come down. I took the opportunity to short Nokia which turned out to be bad trade. It is my worst trade of the day and I am losing $140 in this single trade.
Lesson learned: I was so careless by not looking at other communication stocks like T, VZ, S as they were hitting high of the day. The whole communication sector is bullish and Nokia was just having a temporary correction.

2. After I got our from NOK, I was thinking to Long some communication stocks. My colleague was in VZ and S and he was making money in it. I compare T with VZ and it looked like T has more room to go. I Longed T and I got killed!
Lesson learned: It was about 11 am and normally this time there will be less volume as people who made money in the morning will take profit and go out for beer and lunch. I should not be so reckless to enter a position that it might made a major movement, especially after 11 am.

3. I shorted GM in the morning price: 19.39 at about 9:39 am and put a stop at 19:51. It triggered my stop. This was a bad trade. I know that today GM will release its auto sales and I did not wait for the Sales number and shorted the stock. At about 1:50 pm, the GM auto sale number was released, it was -13% compare with estimate -5.5% It was a bad number, I took advantage of that and short GM and I earned back some money. Without knowing the auto sales of Ford, I was stupidly think that F might follow as it was the sister stock and I shorted F at the same time and I lose money in it. Ford Auto sales was -7.6% versus estimate of -9.7% which was better than expected. I should have more careful and know all the information before trading any stock. I learned my lesson well.

Summary of the day
I did many bad trades today and I should be more careful. Today was a strong market and I was losing money. This is totally unacceptable! If I randomly Long any 5 stocks and don't even bother on them and close my position before the market closes, I would have made thousands of dollars.