Trading Review 2018
2018 was interesting. I traded a little at the beginning but the market felt even more difficult to trade after the state of the union address. I just couldn’t find anything I liked so I ended up not trading much at all. I had a few losses but I can’t even remember them now because they were so long ago.
My main wins were from swing trading $ALLY and $AMD. I successfully dip bought $ALLY when it hit my daily trend line and I sold it the next day for a nice win on 100 shares.
Most of the year I was working on my algo trading application to integrate with IB then actually writing algorithms. I experimented with different setups like red to green, 5m/15m opening range break out, MACD, and bull/bear flags. There were some that worked but bull flags have been the most consistent. Bear flags work too but I couldn’t make them as consistent. I’ll have to revisit them since I think they need a slightly different algo to work and you can’t just flip a bull flag upside down like some have said.
I don’t think I watched a single Tim DVD like I said I would from 2017. I’ve seen them all and I still don’t know what his strategy is. There’s nothing about how to trade flags or any technical indicators/patterns. It’s just support/resistance, which is fine, but I need some type of chart pattern to trade. I can’t just randomly buy some dip and hope it holds. That’s not feasible. I need a clear entry and stop loss.
This is why I like Kunal (and even Ross). I said in another post that I based my flag trades on his “how to trade the open” presentations that he does everywhere. He described the setup so well that I was able to mostly automate it. I mean it still has losses or even a string of losses but that could just be the recent small cap market being slow.
I started a YouTube channel to document my algo trades and have had some insane wins. When bull flags work they really work.
Trading Goals for 2019
- I’ve been letting my algo trade live recently, but it hasn’t taken any trades yet. For 2019, I want to try and be here every day and let it trade as much as possible if it looks good. I have the ability to manually transmit the orders in case the setup is terrible or I know the stock never makes moves. I’m hoping January is good for 5m flag setups.
- I’m writing this on the very last day of 2018 and the past few days I’ve started working on adding GDAX support for my trading app. I’ve backtested bull flags on the 1H chart going back 2 years and it looks promising. I want to focus on that as well as stock trading.