re: Buckle up for today's stock trading

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Do you have a link for your information? Thanks.

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Bank of Japan

Japenese investors selling PM's to cover other losses

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I am happy to make .50-.75% per flip net of fees.

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Right. So if you can do that 20 times per year, on the low-end you make 10% before taxes. That seems really preferable to just always being in the market.

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More like 10-20 times per week.

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So 10 times per week you can flip for 50bps?

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25-50 bp's/flip. Yes. I've already done 7 this week for that much each time. Volatility like we've seen this week is wonderful!

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OK. So if you can do that, then you should never be "in the market" generically. You should be out of the market 99% of the time and using the other 1% to flip for 50bps.

I've been trying to figure out how to describe my personal trading/investing theory and you just did it for me.

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As Jesse Livermore says, there are only about 20% of market days per year in which you should be buying stocks. The rest you should be doing research, holding onto your winners, selling short, or doing more research.

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That's a bit too generic if applied to the market as a whole. Maybe within individual sectors though.

I don't think he had it down to a science. I think the general idea stands, though, that there are more days that you shouldn't be buying than there are that you should.

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If so, I haven't gotten to that part of the book yet

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I am not f'n with you, that is my recollection from reading about him some years ago. Boom, bust, boom, bust, etc. He was definitely sharp but may not have been able to adhere to his own strategy when it mattered most.

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Your comments got me curious about what % "profit" I've had in my day trading since 1/1/11.

I keep all of my trades in my Schwab accounts on an Excel spreadsheet so it was easy to do the math.

My average profit per trade this year = 67 basis points. However, that is a distorted by one grand slam trade I made in February.

If I remove that trade my average profit = 28 basis points.

So my estimate earlier this week of 25-50 basis points was correct but on the low side, ignoring the really, really lucky trade.

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OK. And is that just the average of profit of your profitable trades or the average profit of all trades? If it's all of them, what is your "hit" rate? And what % of your assets do you risk per trade? I suppose I'm saying that if your hit rate is very high (let's say "high" is anything greater than 60%), then you should consider doing very big trades in and out.

In a perfect world, the best way to run equity money would be to go 100% long or short the SPY in quick bursts. At all other times you'd be 100% cash.