April 1, 2010

HXL lessons learned

How long will this rally last? Turns out I got out of my HLX trade way to early. I executed the trade exactly as I had planned. This is good - every trade should have both a planned entry and exit. But you also need to stay flexible, and change your exit if things are looking good.

















My entry - red arrow, was at $10.70 Coming down from a big sell off from $14, which is not shown on the graph. My target profit exit was 25% profit, which translated to $13.50 (automated). I also had a trailing stop of 5% to protect my profit if I didn't reach the profit target.  The green arrow was my exit and profit target at $13.50.The cross in the candlestick the day before I hit the profit target (which was an automated sell) was suggesting the the rally was over. Turned out it was more of a rally-bench-rally pattern,  so I missed the second rally. A better strategy would have been to remove my profit exit and simply tighten the trailing stop up to 1 or 2 %, or wait until the candlestick line crosses the 13 day EMA (Green line), with red bars. To date this still hasn't happened.

I'm not complaining. 25% profit in just over a month is still a pretty good trade...

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