Alright guys! We are 3 months in now in the #NoBlowUpChallenge and although it was a pretty slow past 30 or so days, the theme of being discipline, following rules, and walking away when the edge was no longer to keep profits there defined this period.

Still Nicely in the Green and No Blow Ups!

There were lots of things that absolutely could have gone very wrong in the past 30 days.  $TLRY along with the other weed stocks $CGC and $CRON were mainly the plays that probably flipped short sellers upside down and inside out even to this day, as they seemingly just came back from the dead over and over again.  My approach to these stocks was to just stay small and cut losses quick once things didn’t feel right and while that sacrificed potential bigger profits, it protected me from a big loss as $TLRY isn’t exactly my niche play.  Again guys, while there is still money to be made during slower market conditions, it is critical to tighten your risk management parameters to prevent a big loss and trade defensively until the better, niche plays come back.  

The profits now since the start of the #NoBlowUpChallenge on June 5th now total nearly $90,000!  Considering that the bulk of the last month and the half have been pretty poor in terms of high quality, grade-A niche setups, I would say if you’re still averaging ~$30,000 a month especially doing small size (and without blow ups),  is a win to me!   It’s just going to be a matter of time when things pick up again and the P/L curve will go parabolic.  Patience, patience, patience in waiting for the market to return is the key here!

Ended up finishing this part of the challenge up $11,390 , definitely on the lower side of things but considering the fact that August has notoriously been a bad month for me in the past, finishing green was a big goal of mines this time around and I’m very happy I was able to accomplish that.  Again, doing this on a small $35,000 account is still very good as that’s still a  ~32% return!

I ended up finishing this stretch with a total of 17 Green Days, including an 11 Day Green Streak, and 4 Red days.  Similar mistakes in the past caused the red days again but as I get more and more data, it becomes clearer and clearer what the recurring theme is.  Afternoon trading for the most part didn’t cause any losses this time around so I’m very happy about that.  Oversizing and FOMO chasing still is an issue though as I will outline below.  That’s still something that needs to be addressed as we are still in a market that’s not very forgiving when you oversize relative to the volume and stocks in play like $TLRY with nasty spreads are not idea for FOMO chasing.

Reviewing and Learning!

The 4 red days totaled -$8,319 in losses with the bulk of that coming on August 23rd while the others were a lot smaller, which is great.  Let’s dive into what went wrong so we can extract the lessons from them.

8/23/18 – Oversized here relatively to the volume on OTC stock $CVSI.  Tried to play a bounce and once I missed the sell, there was no chance to get out where I wanted as the thing just kept dropping without getting filled.  Had I been in proper size the loss probably would have been substantially less.  Again very critical to identify the volume and size appropriately!

8/29/18 – Got FOMO here and bid slammed chased $TLRY which I falsely had believed was up too much at the time to rationalize the chase but of course chasing a stock with a big spread is a recipe for disaster as I found out here.  Put myself in a -$4,500 hole before getting it back to more reasonable losses, but the lesson here is key, just don’t chase as that results in you sacrificing a good entry point just to satisfy FOMO.

8/30/18 – The plays today on gap scan were of very poor quality as leading gapper $BLIN was a total grinder from the start but overall I shouldn’t have shorted a stock that was making HOD after HOD after HOD, so that was the mistake here.  Thankfully, the size was small so the losses were negligible but adhering to that rule would have avoided a needless headache.

9/14/18 – Got a little unlucky here as both my platforms froze while I was trying to bounce $NIO at the open and it took me a good 5 seconds to realize my platforms were frozen which proved to be costly as $NIO was infinitely dumping.  But rather than feeling sorry for myself and making excuses, let’s look at what I could have done better.  The mistake here was clearly trying to long a stock that was well below premarket highs and still continuously making lower and lower lows.  This is a fairly simple rule that protected me in the past and sticking to this would have avoided this needless headache whether my platforms decided to crap out on me or not.

How to Improve Even More Moving Forward

All in all, I’m VERY content I finished this part of the #NoBlowUpChallenge green.  In a very challenging period, where there were lots of traps and very little margin for error if you broke rules, I was very happy to have protected myself from disaster.  It was a point to prove to myself that I could finish the traditionally slow and difficult month of August in the green and I did exactly that.  Identifying the mistakes and figuring out what I can do to remedy them is always important and definitely oversizing and chasing are still a couple of things I need to work on as we are still in a market that punishes these mistakes almost instantaneously, just ask the $TLRY shorts.

Hope you guys learned a thing or two from my mistakes to better your own trading!

Until next time!

-Max (madaz)