For Wedn 27th

Strolling down my watchlists. LAYN is my first priority. MNKD is a long bias. It's in a bull flag. You can always confirm a bull flag by declining sell volume day after day in the flag consolidation. Most people will just look at price. Volume is equally important though. If it hits over 4.91 tomorrow it should run. I have three watchlists. Long biased watches, short watches, and position trades. Position trades are mostly indices, us dollar and maybe a couple stocks. All the lists are pretty small watchlists. The most I'll have on one list is 15 max. I have 10 long/neutral, 6 short and maybe ten position.

NYMX back on radar. Trend support widened out some. Trend support does that over time. It looks to be hugging new trend support. Still not many sellers on the daily volume. If it clears 1.60 it could pop.

Next one is going to drop like a rock any day now. This is a gift. Short short short. Hopefully there are shares out there.

Last short watch is VBLT. It has never held big gains well. Looking at the chart history it sells off after a big run.

LAYN Setup

LAYN is a water company and is up a lot off of the lows this year. The sheer size of the move up to this area says short bias. However, the triangle it formed will be the setup. Which ever way up or down it moves off the tip here is what counts and tells direction. Should be good for a $1 a share move.

Trading Watches 5/21

short ISR PBMD BONA MXPT Long or short NES. NES has a clean high flag triangle.

ISR Recap

I traded ISR today. I bought the breakout at 2.23 and sold at 2.88. It ran on lung cancer data. Cancer stocks can go big time. I bought into a bit of a spike. I could have waited longer for a pullback which actually came but made a good choice to just get some filled with a wide stop.

PTBI Consolidation

This is a symmetrical triangle at the moment on light sell volume. Says bullish. Which ever direction it goes off the tip of the triangle should have significant follow through.

Tuesday MBI SPY

MBI is a short bias. Looks overextended. CHOP did exactly as I expected coming off of that bull flag. I didn't trade Monday and missed it. Gold miners are kind of erratic here and aren't as easy to trade as usual. S&P 500 and Dow Jones is a long on any continuation breakout. I posted on this the other day about the bull triangle on these indices. SPY and the Dow.

Junior Miners Trade Recap

I shorted the junior gold miners index this morning at the open. I used the 3 x leveraged ETF JDST. The idea for the setup was that GDXJ the index was very overbought which you can see by just the price candles and especially in RSI 2. I drew all of this up in the chart below. The other thing was that the previous day it had gapped up ran and faded all the way down. It printed a clear shooting star candle. The candle also was above the upper "Bollie" bollinger band. The dollar looked oversold which drives gold which drives this index. I shorted the open which was below the previous close and it looked like more lows were coming. JDST found support at 6.50 in the morning so I set a stop loss to trigger on a cross below 6.48. It triggered later and I sold JDST for a 5% loss on a slightly undersized position. I'm neutral on GDXJ now and may trade the breakout or a consolidation.

Bull Triangle on Indices

The S&P and Dow are forming bull triangles. The Nasdaq is a wide trading range. These bull triangles look pretty good. We just need a full trading day or two to finish above the resistance and off to the races again. I kept getting errors uploading the charts.

Watches 5/14 Thursday

short bias PTBI long bias CHOP DSCO NYMX

AMCN Short Recap

AMCN has been on my shorts watchlist for about a month. It has been predictably choppy. I've just stayed away from it because it was so messy. No clear setups. Today I finally saw a good enough short setup as a second bull flag failed on the daily charts you can see below. Well, technically it was retest of the first failed bull flag.

This is the last "flag" trend support I was looking to see get taken out. This is a four day chart.

After it took out the 4.40 support I shorted at 4.38 a share. It was an easy trade because it just dropped off a cliff all the way down to 4.13. It looked a little oversold then at 4.14 and I started a market order to cover if it was going to go to 4.16. Right around the bottom at 4.13, 4.14 the bid and ask started to go crazy. There were atleast 12 changes on the bid and ask in 3 seconds. I think they even flipped. In other words the ask price of say 4.15 switched to 4.13 and the bid 4.13 was 4.15. Muddy would call this "jiggy", started to "jig". That was enough for me so I covered at 4.15 and sure enough that was the very bottom. The stock started a gradual climb after that.

NYMX Trade

I longed NYMX with a buy stop that first day it started to run. I got a 1.38 entry. Today into the spike I sold just over half the position at 1.58 a share. That was a good exit because the highest the stock got was 1.60. I figured based on the past couple days of runs it would usually top out after 10% or so. I was really just looking at the candle lengths though. After selling those shares I immediately put a sell stop order to sell the rest if it hit 1.44. That would still lock in some profit but more importantly get me out of a free fall. Of course it could go the other way and just keep running to 2.00 a share or something.

I always lock in atleast some profit in a profitable trade. I chose 1.44 as a good stop loss area because a technical breakdown would be taking place if it hit below 1.44. Once 1.44 was taken out everybody else's stop losses would trigger. As a result the fill I got wasn't that great. I got filled at 1.40. I would have scaled the same way if I had to do it again. Not selling the entire position at 1.58 cost me a little profit but it would have been way dumber to miss a 40% run or so which this stock has proven to be capable of. The only thing I did poorly on this trade was the entry. I could have gotten the 1.20s or low 1.30s. I probably should have scaled in with a small position first in the 1.20s because I was pretty confident on this run.

In the chart below the yellow lines are under 1.44 that support I talked about.

Watches 5/6

NYMX ran as expected and could run again today. Crude oil is a setup long.