Happy Tuesday, folkses. 😊
Ready for the recap? 🙃
Wild trading morning today. I almost retired from trading altogether today. I started taking some trades premarket because I caught a stock as it was starting to break out, and so I was in the green early before the normal trading day opened.
So it was a good start. I was in good position to make more money with that stock, as it was trending up toward the high of day just as the market was going to open, which quite often means a quick burst upward as the new players want to get in on the action.
So I was all poised for the jump up, and it did jump up, but only a handful of cents. Then it started to drop, and I tried to sell… and tried to sell… and tried to sell, but I couldn’t get my order filled because it was dropping quickly enough that by the time I’d made the new order, the price was already lower than that order, so no one was going to buy.
Needless to say, I went from being green to being red, I believe, on that one. I think I ended up down like… $500 after that trade? It was sad, too, because I was green and up and trying to sell, but I couldn’t get out. I think I had a brain cramp forgetting that I was now standard trading session, and I could have used a market order. Being as new as I am to trading, I forget those little nuances about how things work at different trading times.
Anyway, so I got caught in the quick drops, lost everything I’d made, plus hundreds more. At that point, I was like, maybe I’ll go back to my old standby. When I first started trading, my strategy was to buy my favorite electric car stocks on the days that they opened way down, as the patterns almost always curled back up a fair amount. They’d drop, curl up a fair amount, then drop again and curl up, and then drop again, etc., before slowly rising to end the day (ending the day still down, but higher than the low).
Today was one of those days for electric car stocks (I think Tesla tanking on the news that Elon Musk was successful in his purchase of Twitter had a huge ripple effect across the electric car stock trading world, as pretty much everyone was down and down a lot. So I went over to one of my favorite electric car stocks and watched the crash, bought on the beginning of what I expected to be a much bigger trend back up, but I think that’s about when the Tesla ripple effect came in. I actually got in with a larger share size than normal, and the stock plummeted after bouncing a tiny tiny bit. I mean just dropped straight down and fast. Just like that, I was down like $1400 on the day. I tried one more time and was down $1700+.
😶
At that point, I sort of looked at myself and said, okay, this is your last trading day. Looks like you’re going to hang up your hat today. I was relaxed, not super stressed. Not happy, obviously, but calm and just sort of taking it in.
Then I though, well… I could go work on cars, and if I bust my butt today, I can make back a decent chunk of that $1700 loss. And then I was like, or… I could try and take really careful trades and chip away at the $1700 loss, make it more palatable of a loss, and move on.
Today’s thinking was different than sort of zoned-out revenge trading. It wasn’t emotional so much as strategic. I was like, ok, I’ll look for good positions to take. I won’t greedy. I’ll chip away at it.
So I decided to give it a try. What the heck, my last trading day, let’s see what I can accomplish.
I searched around for stocks that were setting up nicely for positive moves, and I began to try to chip away. First trade was a success. I think I got into the down $1600 range. Second trade was a success. I think I got into the down $1400 range. Third trade I got hit, back into the $1700 range, I think. Another success got me to being down $1200, and I was starting to feel pretty good about my choice to stay and try and carefully dig out. Down $1200 just felt so much nicer than down $1700. I mean, obviously, but I was upbeat about a $1200 loss on the day, like “Cool, I got it down to $1200. Nice!”
About that time, I found a stock that was setting up nicely. I made a trade, and I think I got it down to like $900? I’m honestly just making numbers up because I don’t remember anything clearly other than being down a bit over $1700 and getting to the down $1200 range at some point).
Anyway, so I found myself, I believe, down only the high three digits, and was feeling even more please. Then it happened. I put in another bid on this stock that had just done me well, and for some reason, I bought twice the number of shares I usually buy (I usually buy 1000 shares of whatever stock I’m buying, just to keep the numbers round and easy to know exactly where I stand. A movement of one penny is $10, up or down, easy math.
Anyway, so I, for whatever reason, was in with 2000 shares when the stock ripped up, and fast. I rose like a rocket, so quickly, in fact, that it triggered a halt up on the stock–all trading suspended for 10 minutes to give everyone a chance to think about what they were doing.
Having ripped up so fast, and me holding 2000 shares, I looked at my account balance, and realized that if I could sell my 2000 shares even near where the stock was halted at, I could be back in the green for the day!!!
So I watched the level two data like a hawk, and there were plenty of buyers lining up to buy at way more than what the stock was halted at. And at the beginning, there were plenty of sellers right around the halt time, so it looked like it might rip up again and go into a double halt up, but seeing that I could get green for the day, and not knowing what was going to happen when trading was allowed to resume, I put decided to put my sell order in for less than the current halt price. As I did that, I also noticed that others were doing the same, and the sell prices were getting lower and lower, indicating to me that there was a chance this could open and drop down quickly.
Anyway, so I put in my sell order of all 2000 shares as soon as the trading resumed, and gratefully, it was filled immediately before the stock went down so fast that it caused a halt down.
😅
(interestingly, on the day, the stock proceeded to go from like $4 to $13 at its high. My foray into it was in the $4-$5.75 ish range).
So what was the net result of the trade? I had managed to climb all the way from $1700+ down to up $629 on the day. As soon as I saw green, I tapped out and was like, I’m done.
Had I held on to that stock, I could have made many thousands of dollars today–like $14k. But you can’t think that way. You’ll always miss opportunities. You just don’t know what is going to happen. You can’t foresee that after halting down right after halting up that it’s going to go on to kick serious tail the rest of the day (before selling off madly at the end of the day like it did. I think it went from $4ish to $13ish and down to… $6ish? by the close of the regular trading hours. Crazy swinging stock.
I was super stoked to be out and green. It was just… great. 🙂
That’s also my biggest single gain for a day (not in terms of how much I was in the green, but in terms of the swing, from $1700+ down to $600+ up. A swing of over $2300–in like… 30 minutes? Less?
Anyway, that was pretty good. 🙂
From there, I went out to fix cars, grateful to have made all that loss back up, and to have made a little bit on top of that. I still have a ways to go to get back to black, but… maybe I’ll get there before forced retirement? I can see growth in my trading. The last couple of days, I haven’t let my emotions rule me. I haven’t gotten really mad to speak of when things went south. I’ve been more deliberate in my trading. I’ve been better at avoiding the pitfalls I’ve fallen into previously. (sure, I’ve made other mistakes, but I’m learning from at least some of the mistakes I’ve made, so that’s good). We’ll see how trading goes tomorrow. I’m going to be carefully aggressive, I think? I’m hoping to get a green day on my electric car stocks, as we had a pretty hefty red day for nearly all of them. One of them might open super strong tomorrow (Lucid) because they made a deal with Saudi Arabia to sell them 100,000 cars over the next 10 years, so… that stock that tanked super badly during the standard trade day went up a good bit in extended-hours trading, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it does the same tomorrow. I’m hoping that all the electric car stocks rebound a bit, and I can size up in shares and make a decent bit.
So… cars… only four cars today. I was all set to go bust out a bunch of cars today as well, but it wasn’t to be. The first car fell through (my fault, not theirs, as I didn’t communicate well enough to get them scheduled as my first job of the day like I was hoping to. Instead, I’ll get them tomorrow. That mistake had me driving all the way out to Bentonville for no cars, only parts to pick up.
One of my other cars scheduled for today canceled because he was able to get a hold of the other mechanic who’d “fixed” the issue I found, and that mechanic said he’d warranty it out, so that was good for him/them.
So that left me with a much thinner schedule than I’d anticipated. I didn’t get to the first car until like… 1? I don’t remember when for sure. First car was a report of no power steering and a charge light on. I figured it’d be a busted or slipped belt, but nope. I got there, and the car was dead (only 3 volts of charge on the battery). So I thought, oh, bad alternator. So I jumped the car, but no, the alternator was fine.
🤷♂️
That was weird.
So I charged up the battery, and it tested good.
Double head scratcher.
So I asked him to go and take it for a test drive, and he got in, but the power steering wasn’t working. I hadn’t heard any power steering pump noises, so my heart sank, and I figured he had a bad power steering pump (I really dislike changing power steering pumps. Messy. Not quick… yeah.
So I popped open the reservoir, which on that particular car is located under the alternator. Yeah, you read that right, the power steering pump reservoir is below the alternator on that car.
Genius.
Just leave it to General Motors to make ridiculous engineering choices like that. Goodness. What that leads to is making it easy to knock crap into the reservoir. It leads to making it really hard to check your fluid levels because you have to contort your arm around various parts to even reach the cap. Makes it annoying to fill because you have to get a really long and skinny funnel that can reach down there, but then of course you can’t see how full it is because it’s way down where you can’t see, so you have to keep pulling out the funnel, stuffing your arm way back down there (and on a hot engine, you burn yourself every. single. time. you have to put your arm down there, which I did, thank you very much.)
Genius.
Did I mention it’s just a genius design?
Anyway, so he had like no power steering fluid, presumably because it’d all leaked out (there was fluid all over everything below the pump and reservoir). So I cleaned it all off, and looked and looked, but I couldn’t prove a leak anywhere. Since I couldn’t prove the leak, even though it looked like it might be coming from the pump itself, I suggested that he just get himself a funnel and top off as needed, and I taught him how to check for the leak, just in case it started leaking again, perhaps he could tell where it’d come from.
I also cleaned his throttle body, which fixed a rough idle issue he was having, so that was good, too.
Second car was… supposedly a no start on a 2014 Kia Soul (first car was a 2007 Pontiac Grand Prix). But when I got there, it started. It ran like crap, but it started. She had a handful of check-engine codes, but I noticed that the fact that the engine would start up and then nearly choke itself out before staying going meant that there was a good chance her throttle body was dirty as well, so I checked it, and it was really dirty, so I cleaned it, and that solved the choking out issue.
I cleared all her codes, found that she had some outstanding recalls, and that one of the recalls might be related to one of the codes she’d been having popping up (p0420, a catalytic converter code). So she was happy her car was going, and I gave her instructions for what to do next.
Third car was a 2005 Chevrolet Silverado 1500 5.3, similar to mine but a couple years newer, and full rear doors instead of the two little suicide rear doors that I have on mine. He was also having power steering issues.
Joy.
Gratefully, his power steering leak was perhaps the easiest of all fixes–his power steering line was loose for some reason and pouring out fluid, so I tightened it up, filled up his system, and called that one a rap.
The last car was a 2004 Nissan Pathfinder that was wrecked in the rear and needed a new hatch latch assembly. I got there, and she’d purchased the wrong part, so I took off the part that needed to be replaced so she could get the right part by matching it up, and I called it a day.
I charged her only half my normal visit because I was there for such a brief time, but she gave me a $35 tip anyway. She’s given me large tips every time I’ve gone, even though she lives in the poorer side of town and drives a beat up 2004 Pathfinder. I protested the tip, not wanting her to keep giving me so much money, but she insisted, so I’ll be grateful.
Came home. Ate dinner. Showered (for the first time in a good little while because I’ve just been go go go, and I’ve been blessed with a serious lack of BO in my genes–somehow), watched some electric car news videos, and spent way too much time writing this blog entry.
Cross my fingers and hope trading goes well in the morning. 🙂 Would be totally cool if I could get back to break even by the end of April, but that would mean having massively good days every day for the next three days.
I can dream. 🙃
Okay, good night all. Thanks, for your supportive messages. Had someone apply to work for me today, two people, actually. I was going to meet up with one of them, but then he stopped replying. Not sure if it was phone issues or what, but I guess we’ll see. I haven’t looked at the other’s resume yet, but we’ll see.
Love to all.
Lift the World
~ stephen
p.s. Today was my 800th post on this particular blog. 🥳
Lift the World 