Two years, baby. 🥳 Not really super important, but it’s a habit (journaling) that’s good for be anyway, I think. It’s certainly been helpful at times in many different ways.
Busy busy day today, not that busy days are anything new. I’m generally running around trying to accomplish more than I ought to squeeze in a day.
Let’s see, today. Would you believe I had yet another settled cash debacle trading today?
Yeah, I know.
It was so frustrating, and if leaves me nervous for what might happen in the future because it’s just not being consistent. I even spent probably 30 minutes on the phone with them that, and basically they told me that what I said happened the other day couldn’t have happened because that’s not how the system works.
Ugh.
What happened today? Well, I made I think $350 ish on my first trade. Then I went to buy another and didn’t realize it had auto populated with 1000 shared.
(gulp)
(I’ve since figured out why she have shut off *anything* from auto populating in the future. Was another goofy mistake that happens because I’m not yet calm enough as a trader to be relaxed and fully focused. It’s still novel, and there’s a good bit of adrenaline, and I’m trying to make the trades as quickly as I can to get the price I’m wanting, etc.
Anyway, needless to say, I didn’t intend to buy 1000 shares. That’s… a lot of money. The other issue was that given what I thought I’d learned from my experience the other day, that my settled cash went down on both the but and the sell, I thought I could only sell the amount I had left in settled cash.
The stock went up, as I expected, and so I divided the remaining settled cash to see how many shares I could sell, and then I sold them, for a small profit.
I then looked at my settled cash, she it didn’t go down on the sell this time like it did the other day. So… though I was afraid of getting a violation, I went ahead and sold roughly the same amount again.
Again, the settled cash didn’t go down!
🤔
Ok… At that point, I was like, fine, I want to try and sell all the rest. But there was a problem, the stock dipped into the red at that point. I lost my opportunity to sell the rest at a profit because I was certain both buys and sells were counting against my settled cash because I watched it happen, and it caused me a big headache when it happened the other day, she I lost opportunities because if it, and so I got hosed again today when it didn’t take it out on the sell because I could have sold my whole position all at once when I wanted to.
That’s when I called it a morning, setting an automated sell order, just in case the market went back up enough to make some money on the position.
So… I made money on my first three trades. But I’m down on my position, with a lot of money *in* the position because of the settled cash debacle. Hopefully, tomorrow I’ll be able to get that back.
The Auto populate hurt badly too because pretty much all of my watch stocks did *really* well today, but I was stuck holding this losing hand. Once again, I lost a ton in opportunities that I could have capitalized on but wasn’t able to because of the issues.
At that point, there was nothing I could do, so I just let it go and went out to work.The
The work day was an adventure as well. My work van started misfiring before I even pulled out of the driveway. And it was a dead miss, too, meaning it was misfiring every time. So I limped it to the gas on the way to Rogers, ordered a coil pack, and waited for it to be delivered, which took them almost 45 minutes when they said it would be 10.
So that slowed the day a decent bit, eating an hour chunk of time. That said, I’m a really proactive, productive person, so it’s not really ever wasted time because there’s always something productive to fill the time with. In this case, I took the time to ensure that I won’t ever lock myself out of my work van again. That was important.
I also did phone errands and updated my to-do list, etc. Cleaned up the van a little bit. Good stuff.
Coil finally came, and I realized they ordered the really expensive one and not the normal one. 😶
Whatever. Just money. Needed to get working, so I didn’t mention it to them, just put it in and was on my way.
First car was a 2010 Toyota Matrix that they thought had power steering issues, but the loss of power steering was because the alternator wasn’t doing it’s job. Fortunately for them, the alternator was covered under warranty by the dealer they bought it from, so I walked them through some things to do to help them prepare for the repair in order to get them on the road faster, and then I headed out.
The second job was at the University dorm in Fayetteville on the University of Arkansas campus. It was a 2018 Ford F-150 that was cranking but not starting. When I got there, the tank was completely on empty, but he said that he had something like 15 miles left on the range, and he even added an extra gallon of gas just in case it was an issue with low fuel. What he didn’t realize was that he was parked nose down on a fairly steep parking lot, and fuel pumps are generally in the middle of the tank or more toward the rear of the tank, which meant that all the gas which he had in the tank, probably 2 gallons or less was puddled up in the front of his tank and not wear the pump itself was. So I drove to the gas station, bought 5 gallons of gas, all the while talking to a Fidelity representative on the phone trying to figure out what on Earth was going on with the settled cash issues I was having, and I headed back to the truck, put the gas in, and she started just fine.
I can’t say the same thing about the conversation with fidelity. Basically he told me that what I experienced was not how the system worked and couldn’t have happened. He said that settled cash is not ever removed on the sell, only on the buy. That makes sense, but that isn’t what happened the other day. So I’m still left scratching my head because I got hurt badly again today. Today it functioned exactly like he said it was supposed to. And nobody can seem to explain to me what happened to the other day, why it took money out on both the buy and the sell.
In the end, the Fidelity representative suggested that I read up on the site and watch some YouTube videos or something to try and better understand settled cash. 😕
Cross your fingers that I can sell the position I’m in fairly soon for a profit. I thought about just eating the loss so that I can have the cash back to play around with. I’d still be green for the day, and then I’d have the cash to do what I wanted with. But I don’t want to take the loss. 🙃
I guess it’s obvious, but the issues I’ve been having with settled cash has probably cost me several hundred if not thousands of dollars in Lost opportunities. It hasn’t yet caused me issues in going on the negative on a trade overall, but it’s cost me the opportunities of making what I could have made. Had I not had so many issues with settled cash, I would be much better overall in my gains. So.. any of you out there who might be considering day trading, I guess you now know if you didn’t already, that settled cash and understanding how it works is super freaking important.And
And I still only hope I understand it. I’m not confident at all, but we’ll see. I’ll keep an eye out, and we’ll see.
Third car was a 2012 Toyota Corolla that was having dying issues, and just like my first car of the day, another Toyota with the 1.8 engine in it, the alternator was out on this one as well. The college student didn’t have a warranty on her car, so I ordered an alternator, slapped it in, and headed off to the fourth car.
Fourth car was a 2010 Subaru Forester with a misfire problem, except when I got there, the misfire had gone away. He asked me to go ahead and put in a coil, spark plugs and plug wires, but they only had the coil and the spark plugs, and I didn’t really want to put spark plugs in a hot engine, as you’re much more likely to damage the head, and then you’re looking at a repair bill of potentially thousands of dollars instead of just a spark plug change. Engines because of the dumb spark plug designs need to be warmed up first, but most engines, it’s best if you do not have a hot engine. Not to mention it burns the arms and hands trying to work on engines that are already hot.
Anyway, not being able to reproduce the issue, and not having plug wires available, I put in just the coil pack and suggested we do the rest another day. So that’s what we did. Interestingly enough, he’s moving to Utah soon, haven’t gotten a job out there working at a troubled youth place in provo. So I talked to him about places to live that were much less likely to be engulfed in smog. He was going to go to salt lake valley and commute to provo, and I suggested that he go to Utah county and live in the south end of the valley. Cheaper, and less smog.
Fifth car was a misfire issue in a 2003 Ford e150 with the 4.6 motor in it. It was a cylinder 4 misfire, which means that you have to take the dog house off the inside of the cabin in order to reach the coil pack. I was grateful that I was able to move some things out of the way and not have to completely take the dog house out, as that’s a pain in the butt and sometimes you have to remove a seat to do that. But I was able to do it by opening it maybe 12 in, instead of having to pull it all the way out, so it was actually a pretty simple fix, which I was grateful for. 🥳
By the time I finished that one up, it was pretty late, but I had one more customer who still wanted me to come tonight that I had promised I would go to. It was somebody with a 2004 BMW Z4, same year and model that I have, even the same engine.
His, however, was in need of a lot more help than mine. Made me realize just how good of a deal I got on mine. He paid something like $4,500 for his and drove to Florida to pick it up, and it was in just a mess of condition, but it was what he could get and he felt like it was a good deal. Makes me feel all the more lucky that I was able to get mine for $3,000 and much much better condition. I didn’t tell him how much I paid for mine, though. 🙃
Anyway, I got there and there was a misfire on cylinder 6, so I swapped the coil and six to cylinder one, and the misfire swapped from 6 to 1. So of course, that’s pretty much 100% guarantee that you’ve got a bad coil. I had a coil with me, so I went ahead and slapped in the coil for him, started the car back up, and it was great… for a little while. But then it started running really roughly again. I checked the codes, and again there was a misfire on cylinder one, the coil I just replaced. That didn’t make any sense whatsoever, as the test I had done was pretty much foolproof. So I wondered if maybe I got a bad coil out of the box, so I switched the coil to cylinder number three just to double check, and what happened next was that it started misfiring on five out of the six cylinders. 😶😶😶
Good freaking gravy.
Not something you really want to have happen at 9:00 at night or whatever time it was. When I saw the misfire move from Cylinder 6 to cylinder one when I swap the coils, I was excited because it was going to be a super easy fix and I’d be done with that job.
But no, no such luck. I ended up determining that even if it had a bad coil, which seems a pretty much 100% guarantee, it also had a really bad intake vacuum leak, and that was causing major issues at idle. The only reason why I wonder if maybe my initial diagnosis was wrong was that it’s so rare for more than one thing to be wrong in the same system of a car and cause the same symptom. So it was like which one do I choose? Either there was a coil that was bad AND it had a vacuum leak that was making it run rough at the same time, or the fact that the misfire switched from 6 to 1 when I swapped the coil from 6 to 1 was a complete coincidence and was caused by the intake leak causing misfires in different cylinders that just so happened to be perfectly timed with when I changed the coils from one cylinder to the other.
Yeah, neither option is very statistically likely. In fact they’re both really statistically unlikely, so I scratched my head a bit. What is absolutely certain is that he needs a new intake hose, and he needs a new brake booster vacuum hose, and he needs a new valve cover gasket because it’s leaking directly on his catalytic converter and smoking like nothing else, and as we found out while doing all the testing, apparently he’s got an issue with his cooling fan system because the car overheated badly while I was doing other tests.
Lovely.
At that point in time, I just called it a night. Too many things to try and figure out at too late at time in the evening.
Well, once again, that’s more than I planned to write. Interesting day. Crossing my fingers for tomorrow, hoping my stock that I had to hold on to will climb back up a little bit so it’s not another loser.
If I want to look on the bright side, you could say that despite all the issues I’ve run into, I’ve actually done very well in my trading. I was 14 for my first 14. Then my first losing trade was an accident where I accidentally had it set to sell instead of buy, so I don’t really count that one as a losing trade because it wasn’t a poor choice, it was poor execution with a careless mistake. I guess I shouldn’t call it careless, there’s so much going on constantly that it’s easy to miss something. Especially when you’re changing those settings constantly back and forth and back and forth depending on what you’re doing at the time and what’s best for the moment. But I don’t really count that one as a bad one but I will just for the sake of counting it as a bad one I guess. So I was 14 for my first 16, and then my last three sales have all been gainers, so I’m 17 for 19, and I’ve got one outstanding position that is currently down that I’m hoping will go back up. I believe it’s a good stock, so it’s got a good chance of going back up, I think. So overall, my statistics for successful trades are really really good. Day traders talk about having a 60 to 70% success rate as being really good, and I’m over 90% if you don’t count the accidental sell when I was trying to buy.
So I could take all that as a big positive. And if you remove all the mistakes I’ve made just because I’m a novice not knowing how to actually work the process of buying and selling stocks like I should without making functional errors, then I’ve only made one bad trade out of everything.
Meanwhile, I’m getting my taxes closer to being submitted. My accountant sent some stuff back to me to sign, but she missed sending everything I needed, so I’ll get that done tomorrow morning. Then it’ll go into the various government agencies, and I might even get a little bit of money back. If I didn’t already say that, it looks like not only will I not owe more money, I’m actually going to get some little bits of it back.
I may well still have to pay fines for being late, and I still have to pay my accountant for all the work that she’s done, but I’m pretty happy that I don’t owe tens of thousands of dollars like I thought might very well be the case.
Time for bed, folks. I’m a little excited for tomorrow, as it’s supposed to rain all day, so I haven’t scheduled any cars for tomorrow. It’ll be a crazy busy rest of the week, but it’ll be nice to have tomorrow off.
My love to all of you. Thanks for sticking with me for 2 years of this adventure so far.
PS if you’re curious and wanting updates, the property I went to look at with my mom down in whatever town that was had some good upside, and also some decent downside. I mentioned the downside to the seller as well as saying that I wouldn’t be offering the full asking price and asked how much she was willing to negotiate, and she never replied back, so that one’s probably done.
Speaking of not replying back, the woman that I messaged on Match.com and was excited and hoping to hear back from looked at my profile yesterday, and still hasn’t written back. In the online dating world, most of the time people don’t respond to your messages if they’re not interested. So, as expected, no reply, no interest…
It’s always the same. 😕
I’m not going to think about it right now, though, as I don’t want to start getting more discouraged.
Good night, folks. Love to all. 😊
Lift the World.
~ stephen
Lift the World 