Cap's Log 3/6/04
So much to do, so little time!
Currently, the irons I have in the fire are these:
1. Continue work on programming an application to run a mechanical contrarian strategy. I've named the program "Milestone" and am writing it in a free version of BASIC that I found on the net. I find it really enjoyable and easy to work with. The idea behind the strategy is basically the old "buy low sell high" idea, and what "Milestone" will do is provide recommendations for where to set buy and sell alerts as well as the size of the trades. The programming is going well, but I haven't worked on it for a couple of days.
2. There are now five main strategies that I'm looking at, and I better be careful not to go overboard with this. The five are:
a. breakout trading for stocks from 1-5 dollars
b. bottom reversal trading for the same stocks
c. the mechanical trading system "Milestone" for very low priced stocks with high percentage movements
d. A version of Automatic Investment Management (AIM) for several long term mutual fund positions
e. A new daytrading strategy for stocks from 1-3 dollars (this is a brand new one)
3. None of these strategies is totally complete as far as having the details worked out and set down in my trading binder; gotta get cracking on that!!
4. I am still trying to nail down exactly how to best use stockcharts.com to organize my scanning, screening and monitoring activities. This pertains basically to the breakout and bottom reversal strategies. One main problem that I and others have is that there are SO MANY stocks to keep track of. I run a scan and may come up with a half dozen stocks to watch, and what happens? I go to the BOT board and see hundreds of posts about stocks, some of which may have come up on my scan and most of which didn't. Do I keep the stocks from a daily scan when the day is over and just keep adding to it so the list gets larger and larger? Or do I keep replacing the stocks on the list so I'm always looking at a new set of just a few each day? I like the first idea better because I'd like to eventually have price alerts set on a huge number of stocks that I've already analyzed in the past. From one of Omni's post on the Bot board it sounds like he does something similar to that. But then there's the problem of rechecking all the charts each day and resetting possibly hundreds of price alerts. I'm not even sure how many price alerts Fidelity will allow me to set, so this may not work. Anyway, I checked to see how many stocks meet my current price and volume criteria, and the scan came up with 311 as of Friday. But if I ever have buy alerts set up on all these stocks, then why would I continue to do scans?? Shouldn't scans identify just a few stocks that are likely to go up NOW? But that brings me back to the "just a small list of stocks that is replaced each day" idea which doesn't seem to be working out. Hmmmmm. More on this confusing subject later...
5. How did I come up with this new daytrading idea of all things?? Well someone who frequents the BOT board as well as this one (and she knows who she is) sent me a message last night asking if I used Esignal. I don't but I have checked out their web site a little in the past, so this message sort of prompted me to go look at it again. They have some pretty cool intraday scans, and one of the strategy discussions there was talking about using the first hour's trading range to set up trades. Then I remembered that Fidelity's Active Trader Pro system (which I currently use) has an intraday filtering feature that I hardly ever use. I started messing around with that and one thing led to another. I did some "back of the envelope" number crunching and came up with a basic intraday strategy. I'm hoping to do a trial run with this on Monday.
Well, enough of this. It's breakfast time and I have to get some work done at some point this weekend...
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