I put a poll on the right side of the sidebar to ask if you keep any type of trader’s journal for your stock and options trades. Any type of investing or trading journal qualifies for this poll. Even a blog about investing counts in this survey. One of the points of a trader’s journal…
Month: October 2007
Motorola (MOT) Naked Put Options Trade
Jim Cramer mentioned Motorola last night on Mad Money as a good stock pick right now. Generally his picks will spike for a couple of days and then drop back a little below the closing price from the day before he pumped the stock. I checked it out last night and thought the chart looked…
Stock Investor Patience Creates Greater Returns
I’ve found that one of the reasons I’ve become so much more consistent with my gains in the stock market over the past few years is the patience I’ve developed as an investor. I used to try to trade once per week, kind of a dollar cost averaging type move. I figured I would catch…
My Trader’s Journal Updates
I made three updates to My Trader’s Journal over the past couple of days. 1. I’ve started keeping a MTJ “Stock Market Sentiment” rating at the very top of my home page. This will generally be based on the charting of indexes I do every weekend, but can change mid-week too if a large macroeconomic factor hits…
Barron’s Stock Picks, 10-15-2007
For those who don’t read Barron’s (you should) the format is pretty basic. It generally comes in two sections unless there’s a special. Each section starts with one or two long articles summarizing the past week’s market activity. Following the summaries are more in depth articles on individual stock picks or pans and some follow-ups….
Dow Jones ($INDU) Chart, 10-12-2007
I’m charting trend lines for the Dow ($INDU) again this week. For the second week in a row the Dow closed above the July intraday high. I’ve drawn three major up trending lines. The top line has acted as the ceiling and the bottom line has been the floor. They aren’t quite parallel, but both are…
Costs of Cover Calls
I just can’t seem to get my rhythm in my IRA like I can in my taxable account. I stopped selling covered calls only to see my stocks pull back. Then I started to sell again when I briefly thought the market wasn’t going to rally only to find I picked great stocks. I’m going to have to…
I have a name!
Yesterday I closed above the $75,000 balance mark in my brokerage account for the first time. I’ve finally decided to use this arbitrary number as an excuse to start using my name on my blog. I’m Alexander Fotopoulos. That’s a mouthful, isn’t it? I’ll just go by Alex. Actually Alex is my real name and Fotopoulos should have been…
Rookie Mistake: Sold Boeing (BA) Naked Put
I was eyeing Boeing (BA) for a naked put late this morning and just happened to hit refresh one last time before I entered my order. BA went from $0.14 down to up by $0.85 and then came back down just as quickly. Volume was insane compared to the rest of the morning. I…