Trading Blog: Fighting FOMO

This past week I’ve been taking my trades on the left coast and, I must say, I could get used to it, especially if I can keep up the results I’ve had so far. This past week has put me up about $35,000 on the month, and I made nearly a fourth of that on a massive $9,000 trade on China Ceramic Co. Ltd. CCCL,

Okay, so trading away from home, usually on a couple laptops using hotel wi-fi, is never ideal when compared to my usual setup. But finishing up my trading before 8 a.m. and having the whole day ahead of me certainly is a plus.

Anyway, aside from fantasizing about life in the Golden State, I have been making good headway on the month this past week. I’ve averaged about $2,700 over the past five days of remote trading. Although, as I mentioned, one of those days was an outlier. I’ve mostly been on track for $1,500 a day, which is still fantastic.

The problem with today wasn’t inherent in the trading setups or the actual trades I made, but more in how I approached some of the stocks leading my gap scanner. Over the past week, I’ve had a pretty typical go at things, with a few good opportunities like Fuwei Films (Holdings) Co., Ltd FFHL gapping up some 50 percent. Then, on Wednesday, I saw (and abstained from trading) Yulong Eco-Materials Ltd. YECO which squeezed up 100 percent mid-way through the day.

It was a serious case of FOMO that I still have mixed feelings about. However, I approached today’s trading action with that feeling in mind. I know other day traders saw YECO, same as me, and I know a lot of them either got in too late, missed it completely, or maybe even made a killing on it. In any case, I was trading today realizing that, if I was still dwelling on the huge move in YECO, other traders were too.

This made me more aggressive than I’ve been through most of October. While my intuition paid off in CCCL, I pushed it too hard and stayed in too long on a few trades after that. Those losing trades wiped all my other wins for the day (about $1,200) plus an extra grand on my CCCL position.

So it was something of a mixed lesson. Would I have traded today for another $1,600 average day? Of course not. But I don’t want today to skew my perception a good P/L. Having 8k, 10k, 20k days is still an accomplishment I strive for, those days mean less when surrounded by $2,000 red days.