Winter is here

Day 16 - Wednesday
Total Account Value: $5989
Available Equity: $4191
Positions Opened: 3
Positions Closed: 5

I went to bed last night with a tickle in my throat and a sniffly nose. So you can imagine how bad I feel today. My head is clouded and the last thing I want to be doing is sit in front of my computer. But while my concentration was on and off, nothing went amiss with my trading account.

In fact, after 16 hectic days I am just a tick under my original account balance, after it hovered just below $6100 most of the day. The market opened well up but I didn't notice many obvious opportunities to enter a new trade. I want to be careful not to overtrade by ensuring that my available equity matches or exceeds the amount used on margin.

It didn't take long until one of my shorts, BSL, hit its stop loss at $7.77 registering my first loss for the week. By days end my two other short positions in AXA and CSM (pyrammided) were no more. With hindsight, upon seeing a green covered watchlist in the morning, taking profits on these would have been wise.

And while AXA showed some trend breaking movement it began move back up toward yesterday's close. I manually exited the trade with a tiny profit. Buyers started to get on board CSM and reminded me that I must be frugal when adding to positions. What would have been a tiny loss turned into a larger than average one ($167).

Suncorp-Metway (SUN) has continued to steadily rise since I went long last Tuesday and the profit is now starting to look valuable. I have kept it open overnight as volume indicators demonstrated strong support. MBL is also doing nicely.

Cabcharge (CAB) made impressive gains yesterday after bottoming out, today gapping up and rising further. However these movements were made on unusually low volume, which tells me they're mostly based on hot air. The stock isn't as liquid as others in my portfolio so I locked away my profits rather than try to gamble on good fortune. Luckily for me it began to struggle toward the close. However, my profit was not much more than my maximum allowed loss of $120. I must remember to look at price targets to determine whether the potential reward outweighs the risk involved. It also seems my maximum loss is too high so I have lowered it to $110. Not much I know, but I'll trial this over the next few days and see whether it helps.

In other trades, I went long on Origin Energy (ORG) and Timebercorp (TIM) as they showed trend reversal signals and opened a small long position on BHP. As an experiment, this will be a longer term trade that I will try to pyramid and take partial profits at continuation/reversal points. My stop losses will be looser. BHP has been the best performing blue chip on the market and it would be silly to miss the opportunity.

Now to get some rest...