Highlighted Trades: 01/31/2024
Our best trade of the day (so far) is a short on APTV. We went short at $83.89, at roughly 1:30 PM EST. This is one of the many positions we’re holding overnight - since the technicals are still good, and the stock isn’t close to our stop loss or target exit. We very nearly had a reverse TK-cross right after entering the position. At first look, that seems like a red flag, but in fact the opposite is true here. Had we exited early due to the near-reversal, we would have missed out on a lot of potential profits. This suggests to me that we could stand to make the rules for early exit a notch stricter. Perhaps we should only exit early if we see a more definitive reversal?
So far, we’re up 3.05% on this - but we’ll have to see how the market moves after hours before we see the final result.
Our most profitable long was on MTCH, and has been closed out. We made 1.86% here, but it could have been improved even further. Had our exit price been higher, we could have made more than twice as much on it. I’m also not a fan of how close we came to getting stopped out, right after getting into the position. To me, it looks like our best move would have been to have both our stop and exit further out.
Lastly, our worst trade of the day. The arrows are a bit misleading here - we went long at $39.46, and got stopped out at $39.17, for a loss of 0.75%. At a glance, there wasn’t any clear way to dodge this loss - especially since the technicals look solid going into it. It’s possible this signal was just a fake-out (as some percentage of our signals always will be), but this is going to be one I keep in the records.
Having discussed that, I also want to shout out this other trade we made on GM, because this one’s a beauty! After the bot called the position, the movement was very consistent, for a 1.28% return. Additionally, this trade was exited at 1 PM EST, before Powell began speaking. Between the consistent movement, never approaching the stop loss, and virtually no dependence on news factors (e.g. earnings, FOMC), this is exactly the kind of thing we want to see!
One last note before the final numbers. Since our bot relies solely on technical signals, we’ve discussed whether or not we want to turn it off during major news events. FOMC today is a great example. We’re currently leaning towards shutting the bot down during news events, especially planned ones like this, but for now we’ve chosen to leave it running. We’re still in a beta release, so the ability to observe its performance in a variety of situations is our top priority. We consider the data yield more important than simulated profits during a beta release. Should we move into a full release of this system, we’ll reconsider this more closely, but for now, we’re going to keep the bot on as often as we can.
In total, we entered way more positions than usual today - with 79 in total (for reference, we average about 50), with 30 long and 49 short positions. Interestingly, many of our short positions remain open. The bot is holding 30 positions over night, all of them shorts. This is the highest number of positions held overnight we’ve seen so far, so I’m interested in how open works out for us.
That’s all I have for you tonight. Thank you for reading - and happy trading!
