Hey Guys,
The market ended up giving us more red yesterday. It's trying to rebound a bit this morning, so we'll see if that gets any momentum. The S&P 500 is around 4,240 right now.
There's not a lot of positions that look good in my portfolio right now, but one in particular that looks really bad is VLO. That ticker dropped off a cliff.
The interesting thing is that I really liked the trade setup when I entered it. Here's how it looked when I got into the position initially:
I love the look of that chart and I would get into a trade with that setup again with no hesitation. It's worked out for me many times and has great results in back tests.
But this time, it certainly did not work out with VLO. Here is a look at what happened next and how the chart looks now:
That sure isn't how we hoped for it to go!
It's an example of how you never know for sure what's coming next on any given stock chart. We use historical buying pressure patterns and statistics to guide our decisions about what to invest in, but ultimately, you can never be sure how any individual trade will end up working out.
The interesting thing is that back tests show us that outcomes like this happen all the time, despite an overall profitable edge. So when trades like these happen, I don't tell myself I should have somehow been able to predict this outcome and avoided the trade. The trade setup was excellent as far as meeting the back-tested criteria, and we know from history that even though that trade setup might have a long term edge, there will still be losing trades mixed in. So I accept that some trades don't turn out well, and move on.
I manually closed my stock position for T this morning. It incurred a partial loss.
I haven't taken on any new stock or option positions so far this morning.
If you have any questions or feedback, I'd love to hear from you.