Trader Blog: Inside 2 Huge Winning Trades From Last Week

After a slow start to the month, the market is again showing signs of life and I’ve been able to really put down the pedal on my trades.

That increased follow-through has shown up in my hit rate and especially in my profit/loss ratio. Over the course of four days, I took trades in 13 names and made a profit on 10 of them, putting me back up to about 77 percent, which I’m quite happy with.

Even more, despite being on the higher end of my average amount of trades on a day, I’ve had three huge trades each above $4,500. Those trades alone would have put me above my typical weekly goal of $10,000, but it’s brought by P/L close to 50, so I’m eager to see what next week brings.

Until then, I want to dwell on my successes this week by focusing in on two those three trades, Reshape Lifesciences Inc. RSLS on Monday and Sphere 3D Corp. ANY on Wednesday.

The second trade that day, RSLS seemed like fairly standard position that I just kept climbing. I was fortunate enough to get in just as it was squeezing up past the $3 level before it got halted on a circuit breaker. It resumed at $3.10 and I kept adding as it made it up past the half-dollar level. I started lightening some of my position as it wavered below $4. Then it shot up just below $4.50, where I took some profit, and then squeezed up all the way above $5, where I got filled for one last scalp.

I ended up at one point with 16,000 shares in RSLS, which is why I was doing a lot of risk management, since there was no telling when it would drop. It ended up getting all the way to a $7 high, but it also dropped back down to $3.10 in less than 20 minutes, which shows you how careful you have to be even in winning trades. While I could have held on a little longer, or even gotten in earlier, and made multiples of what I made, I could have easily lost that much if the chart reversed at $5. I’m happy I banked about my $5,200 on RSLS.

The last big trade of this week was on Wednesday in ANY for $6,300. I liked this trade a lot because I felt in control through most of it and I was able to continue adding to my position all the way through. This was another aggressive trade where I got up to about 10,000 shares. What was different in ANY compared to RSLS was that my entry timing was spot on and I was able to take a $1,500 slice of the profit early and really accelerate as the price squeezed up knowing I had a cushion.

With that, I was able to continue watching halts at every 10 percent gain. Knowing that stocks that get halted on the way up tend to continue moving higher once they resume, I tried to put in buy orders before each halt and plant my levels once trading continued. I did that all the way up to $3.60 and ultimately made $6,300 on the trade.

So a story of two trades. Obviously, Wednesday’s win was the more preferred of the two, but it’s not strictly the size of the profit that makes it my top trade of the week. Really, it more proportion, I was able to get more out of ANY because I was able to approach it intelligently, whereas with RSLS I was playing catch up, trying to book a profit and protect against loss at the same time. While traders should get some practice multitasking, you’re doing yourself no favors chasing after profits before protecting against you downside.