Never Any Losers, Hugh?

Not true!

If anyone ever tells you they never lose, they are lying to you.

I had a losing trade this morning, as a matter of fact. What I don’t want is losing days.

So, here’s how it works. I map out my trading career, in particular, how much I expect to make every day. Today, it was $400. Then I work toward that goal. This morning, my first task was to dump some losing puts I held on to for several days. Theta loss was eating away at them like a cancer and they were set to expire this Friday. Fortunately, we had a couple great (for me) news items released… retail sales numbers along with some poor earnings reports from major retailers, and the release of Fed Reserve Minutes. I felt that these items may be enough to bring SPY down.

And SPY did not disappoint. This stock dropped several points in premarket before finding support. Unfortunately, not quite far enough but that’s ok. I dump them and cleared not only my plate but my mind, freeing me up for my next trades.

Then I proceeded to follow my rules, enter into several more trades, all to the up side and I netted out well over my goal of $400; in fact, I hit $1,560.

So my goal is not necessarily each trade has to be a winner; that’s just not reasonable to expect. Anything can happen to thwart a winner. News is released to move markets, traders sentiment can flip on interpretation of reports, disappointing earnings, volatility changes, my own mental state on how I feel about the position, anything. Markets can even change tack on no apparent reason; they just do.

Not all trades are repair worthy. I probably could have sunk much more capital into my position but I felt I could do better by releasing myself from the bonds of a losing position. Never feel married or obliged to sweat it out to the end. The market does not care about you; you should not care about it.

Tomorrow… God willing and we able, it’s on to another winning day!

Hugh Grossman,

Head Trader, DayTradeSPY