2022-03-24 — Not So Swingy.

Hola, my peeps! Happy… whatever day today was! I honestly don’t remember. I think it was Wednesday. Guess I’d better figure that out before going out to fix cars tomorrow. 🙃

Anyway, today was day two in my foray into the stock market. And I… learned some things today. 🙃I definitely made some newbie mistakes that cost me. 😬

(warning: If you don’t like numbers and analysis and whatnot, this’ll probably be a boring read… fair warning)

First… the unfortunate news of the day, for this green newb:

Lesson 1: Get an actual trading setup. Don’t try to trade by jumping back and forth between multiple windows. Hard lesson learned. I noticed a pattern first thing this morning in a stock I was watching that screamed buy right now. So I went to fill out the buy order, but not exactly sure what to put as my limit for the limit order, I went to refresh the page to see exactly what the stock was trading at in that moment… except I had the mouse focus on the wrong window when I hit the reload, which instead reloaded my entire order form, and by the time I got it all filled back in, I’d lost the opportunity.

That mistake cost me a really good gain.

Lesson learned. Don’t fumble around between pages. Use active trading software, so you can have it all on once screen (as of a few hours ago, I have active trading software installed on my computer, and it’s all set up (beta layout, based on what I think will be an effective display layout). So… that should keep me from screwing things up by clicking the wrong thing on the wrong page in the heat of the moment.

Fortunately, the error wasn’t one that caused a loss, just a lost opportunity.

Lesson 2: This one cost me money. 😬After selling socks, it takes two days for them to settle. Meaning… those funds aren’t back in your account ready to use right away. You can buy again, but you can’t sell again until the stock sale settles because you don’t have enough settled cash to cover it.

Whoops! 🤦‍♂️

So what happened? Yeah… little old me was moving right along buying up stocks this morning, and I went to sell one of them, only to get a lovely little message telling me that I would be in violation if I sold the stock because I didn’t have enough settled cash.

Lovely. So here I was with five stocks that I’d bought and no way to sell them. The market was bouncing all around, and I was paralyzed to simply… watch 😬.

At least… for a little while. In order to get around that, I needed to add more cash to the account. So… for the second time in two days, I wired money over from my bank to my investment company, at the cost of $25 a pop. So that was a bummer.

However, bringing new cash into the account allowed me to sell my positions whenever I wanted to, and as of right now (nearly 2:30 a.m.), I have plenty of settled cash do do whatever I need tomorrow… I think.

So, I started off thinking that I was a swing trader. I figured that I’d buy and hold for a few days or weeks and sell when the gains were realized after buying stocks I felt good about. However, I’m rapidly morphing into a pure day trader (rapidly because… from the beginning, I’ve been a day trader who thought he was a swing trader. 🙃

Why day trade instead of swing trade? Because the stocks I watch often fluctuate more intraday than they do day to day, or at least as much. And when you have solid companies where the bottoms aren’t going to drop out because they’re not risky companies, they simply fluctuate up and down little bits, generally, unless there’s a major market influencing event.

The daily fluctuations mean that there’s more money to be made on the intraday trading than on waiting for the gains over longer periods of time. I.E. if there are three 3% swings (down up or up down) over three days, and the stock goes up 1% overall during those three days, in those same three days, instead of making just 1%, I could make 9%… perhaps even more! I could ride the big swings intraday and the little swings as well. Theoretically, I could make 100%+ gain in 1 day on a stock that only gained 2% over the day or over a few days.

Case in point: Winnebago stock. I was watching the stock history for Winnebago, the trading trends, and the market news. Given what was going on with them as a company (super-good earnings report, solid footing going forward as they move towards electric RVs (pretty cool, btw). I saw a really odd selloff for no good reason (yesterday). The company was kicking trash, but people got on a selling frenzy, and the stock was down something like 5% for the day yesterday. Given everything, it seemed rather likely that today was going to be a gain day for them, or at least they’d be strong and rise over the coming days, so I figured it was a good buy today. The market opened, and they went down a little bit, which I was actually happy about. I bought lower than the open, and then it went back up as expected. And though it only gained 2% on the day overall, since I got in where I did on the swing, I made, I believe it was, a 3.7% gain. So in one intraday trade, I made nearly double the daily increase.

That’s how I’ve made money so far, capturing the drop, and riding the swing back.

Today was a little tighter on the money making. Yesterday, between the two stocks I sold, my overall investment gain was, I think, 2%. Today, I didn’t do as well in the overall percentage, as what happened in the morning with me being hamstrung really killed me on a day that I would have killed it had I not been hamstrung by the cash balance problem.

Today, I think my total investment gain averaged between the buys and sells was a 1.5% gain. That’s not too bad–up 3.5% in two days of trading. Had I not made the rookie mistakes I made, I’d be up a lot more than that today, with a much larger overall gain, but that’s growing pains.

What’s cool so far, though I’m not yet sure what to make of it, is that I’ve made seven buys and seven sells, and though I haven’t made a lot of money because I’m not investing a lot of money right now as I’m still learning and trying not to be greedy and stupid, still, I’ve made money on every single trade. I’m 7 for 7. 😊

So that’s cool.

But is it just luck? Or is my modified teenage strategy a good one?

The jury is still out. I’m under no illusions that I’ve got anything mastered at this point, but it’s fun to be 7 for 7, even if some of the gains are tiny (some stocks I only made like $5 on the sale), but a gain is a gain. I don’t want to get caught up in trying to get the absolute lowest price on the buy and the highest price on the sell. That’s… unrealistic and risky.

Anyway… taking stock of the day, that was the stock story. And as I’m sure you’ve guessed, if you want to stock up on more stock stories, just keep my blog in… mind. 🙃

Did I getcha?

Cars… I fixed cars today, too. I got started a little late on the fixing because I was trying to resolve my settled cash issue, but I got out and got to fixing cars, getting to my first one about… hmmm… noonish? First one was a 2012 Civic no start, that, if you have a Civic of that vintage (2008-2012) that just clicks once when you try to start it, it’s almost certainly going to be a starter. And thus it was this time as well.

Oddly, though I’ve done that job on that generation of Civic who knows how many times, it kicked. my. butt today. First of all, Honda’s design for the power wire to the starter is… just… ridiculous. Second, for some reason, this Civic had wires in two different places that I’ve never dealt with before on these civics. Really really awkward to get to and get undone.

That took a while in and of itself.

But the real mess was putting the starter back in. I went to thread the main upper bolt in, and it wouldn’t go. It would go like one thread and catch right away (lots of resistance). Well… the bolt hole is way up in in the back under the valve cover on the back of the engine tucked underneath the intake manifold. Cross threading a bolt right there would be devastatingly awful, and I didn’t want to risk it at all. So I was super gentle with it, trying to get it in. But I’m having to hold the starter in with one hand while trying to get the bolt threaded in with the other, all the while my hands losing strength, my arms getting tired, my neck muscles running out of gas, and my abs getting a workout (lying on my back under a car with about 12 inches of space, or less, to maneuver in).

Finally, after probably an 30 or more minutes just trying to get the bolts in, I had a fleeting memory of either the same issue on the same make and model or the same issue on another one where, even though it was getting stuck in the first quarter turn, it wasn’t because it was cross threaded: It was just because it was tight.

So… with that memory trickling in, I risked it, and started turning the bolt with a ratchet, even though it was only a quarter of the a turn in.

Success!

😅

(phew!)

So… got that one rapped up, talking a lot longer to do so than I’d hoped. Fortunately, the next job was a familiar one, another one of those Mercedes GL350s with the battery locked away under the carpet under the front passenger seat. Having done it once before, and quite recently, I knew exactly what to do this time, cutting the carpet, the whole nine yards, and I was in and I got the book-rated hour and a half job done in 37 minutes, I think. Something like that.

That was nice, because very frequently, things take a lot longer than what the book says they’ll take.

Third car was another starter replacement. It was grinding a little bit on the let off (meaning that once the car started and the bendix is supposed to retract, it was getting hung up for a brief moment and grinding against the flywheel.

That job kicked my but as well. It was an ’07 Acura TL (another Honda product), and it was a super easy starter job. I mean really easy… except for one thing. The guide studs that hold the starter in place came new on the new starter but were also stuck fast in the transmission case.

Lovely. I had to get the studs out of one of them in order to get the starter installed. Not only that, but Honda decided to put a metal gasket between the starter and the transmission. Who does that nowadays? Didn’t we stop doing that in the 70s? 🙃

Anyway, there was a good little while where I thought I might have to throw in the towel, as I couldn’t get the guide studs/pins out of the block nor out of the new starter. I wanted to get them out of the block because if I damaged the starter trying to get them out of the starter, then I’d have to buy it–break it, buy it.

Man it kicked my but. PB Blaster, huge channel locks, vice grips… nothing worked. I couldn’t get the darn little things to budge at all. Finally, I got a chisel and my sledge hammer, and I gave the studs stuck in the transmission one or two stiff smacks, and that made just enough of a shift, that I was then able to get them out with the vice grips.

Good. Freaking. Gravy.

Grateful I could get them out.

Last job of the day canceled, which I wasn’t sad about because I was well over the edge physically. Went home chatted with mom a good bit, and then I got myself set up with my active trader software (free with Fidelity), so I would be ready for the morning trade.

Did I jinx myself acknowledging the 7 for 7 stat?

I guess we’ll see!

It’s pretty fun so far, honestly. My little numbers/stats/patterns/strategy brain is enjoying the experiment. Would be really nice if I can get my entire income stream from an hour or two of morning trades.

Love to all. Catch you on the flip side.

Lift the World.

~ stephen