Sometimes you can't have it all. After a disappointing Sunday where my FSU Seminoles football team got completely robbed of competing in the colleg football playoffs (more on that below), I opened up the week of trading with a big W on the board. I came into the morning after a lot of reflection over the weekend. Last week was a choppy week to say the least. It is easy to reflect in hindsight about what went wrong and how to fix things, but actually putting those fixes into practice is sometimes easier said than done.
I was not patient last week on days where I took big losses. After a big loss (or any loss for that matter) I always feel the need to get it back immediately. This has led to making a bad situation worse. Learning to deal with losses has been my toughest challenge. Coming into today, I was prepared not to take a trade if I didn't get my A+ setup. After a big gap at the open and a straight drop, it felt like we were in a freefall to the 15,600 that I mentioned in my post from the weeked. Normally when we get a move like that out of the gate, the prevailing trend will be to the downside for the day and fading pops to the moving averages is a good play. After finding a floor in the low 15,700's, the market rallied back to the 15 minute 21 EMA (stronger than usual). Normally it would make a pit stop at the 15 minute 8 EMA, but it moved pretty hard back up. I was watching the 5 minute chart as well, and as we approached the 50 MA on the 5 minute (along with the 15 minute 21 EMA) against some areas of high volume, I started to put on my short $NQ position around 12:15ET. I added to the position through 12:45 getting up to around 90 contracts (larger than I would normally play) with an average price of 15,846. I took a bit of a drawdown ($20K), but felt confident in the position. After some consoldiation, we finally got the drop I was looking for around 1PM. I peeled off the position over the next hour with my best cover coming at 15,808 and booked about $44K in profits. I traded a total of 250 contracts.
As for my Seminoles, we got robbed by the college football playoff committee. The Noles finished an undefeated season on Saturday with a win over #14 Louisville with our third-string quarterback. We were one of three power 5 conference teams to go undefeated and were ranked 4th last week. In no other year has an undefeated power 5 team not made the playoff...until now. I won't go into the conspiracy theory between ESPN, the committee and ratings, but let's just say Vegas had our odds at -600 (85%) to make the playoffs after all games were done Staurday night. Vegas does not get things this wrong. That said, hats off to my Noles. I feel bad for the kids that did everything they were supposed to do and got screwed by a bunch of people that felt they were not good enough to play for the naaational championship.
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