First Trade After My "Vacation"

Wow.... The last two weeks have just flown by! I got back home to a COMPLETE MESS! My pipes had ruptured and the house had flooded just hours before I had to leave FL to catch my plane to Iowa so after dragging a plumber over I had them repipe the house while I was gone and got home to everything covered in plaster dust, all the stuff out of the cupboards, and a mysteriously missing toilet tank lid of all things... Not to mention the mess from having cats left to their own wiles for that time!!!! UGH!!!!

So, of course to relax in between slowly making my way through the destruction, I popped in for some trading today... not that this was particularly exciting given that it's a holiday trading week! I did catch a nice little scalp though in MTW (Manitowoc, Inc.). It ended up being the only trade I took and doesn't even come close to covering the huge plumbing bill I now have, but at least it is a start!!!

I will be using this blog to not only post my daily market action report, but also to share with you some of my trades... the good, the bad, and the occassional ugly! MTW was a so-so trade. I had started watching it around 13:00 ET but it was after that little pop at that time, so I put it up in the corner of my screen to look for a secondary setup. I missed the trigger though by just a few minutes. $82.72 at 13:46 is where I SHOULD HAVE taken it, but wasn't looking at the chart at the time and forgot to set an alarm... drr... Then when I went to execute it I put $85.90 instead of $82.90 in my order and got a fill at $82.92... At least I didn't do that mistake in a stock with a huge spread!!!

So, anyway, it wasn't realy a great start, but I felt confident about the position overall and it was one of those that won't hurt you too badly for making mistakes, which is why I chose it as my first trade and had passed on a few others.

I put an exit order on the books at $83.45, expecting $83.50 to be the resistance to watch for, but the market overall was exhausting itself heading into the 14:00 ET correction period and since I was only wanting to take that first move on MTW to get a good trade under my belt, I went ahead and took my modest gains on MTW with an average exit price of $83.25.

I could have finessed the exit a bit more since my anxiousness at the market hitting resistance led me to not pause for just one more minute which is when it popped up another 10-15 cents. Since the market did stop at about the same time I got out though, I think this decision was not completely unjustified, since many stocks will in fact stall at the same time as the overall market, especially when it had been behaving in much the same manner as the market up to that point in the day, which was certainly the case in MTW....

A chart of MTW can be seen below. The chart is from Townsend Analytics, Ltd. (www.realtick.com):