Even though the competition started yesterday, I didn’t do any trades. Today I thought I’d try it out a bit. Firstly, I have another site where I have generated some industry stock lists and such...and while, let me be honest, the lists don’t really give too accurate information (in addition to the 15 minute delay there are often also update problems) I found the sector/industry Metal Fabrication/Industrial Goods was up 4.2% today and from there I found the stock MINI.
Now I checked the stock out via Yahoo Finance charts. I must admit that this is pretty much the first time I actually tried to use my gained knowledge in practice. And it’s terrible. I mean it’s not terrible in the meaning that trading is terrible, but in the meaning that...the charts really do look confusing. Especially the yahoo charts – while they are good, they are too small to draw the resistance/support lines, to actually see them with your eye. Plus I have pretty much forgot about the main patterns myself, so will need to overview them again. And I discovered I need a printer to analyse the charts better. Duh.
I wanted to buy MINI at the price of 32.78 or just a bit above – see the green rectangle on the chart. However, due to the 15 min delay in yahoo charts and the 15 minute delay in the stock game I gave in my order, eventually got the stock, gave in the sale order, again 15 minute delay, making my loss even bigger. As you can see – fast platform and fast orders are really important, but due to the delays in the competition the timing by when the actual trades were done was really bad, so I took a loss. Had no intention to keep the stock for a longer time than just 10 minutes-1 hour one way or another. Just didn’t consider the big delay times.
Good thing about the terrible-terrible stock charts is that even though I still suck at analysing stock charts, the most basic things are starting to look good. For example, check this chart in this article – it’s the MINI chart. The first resistance line ( too short on the chart, but imagine it’s longer) does give a buy signal ( just for minutes, but still...that’s why you have stop loss options that I don’t in the competition, unfortunately ), the first support line does give a good sell short signal, again, just for minutes, but still. The resistance line 2 – the last price was pretty much the fourth touch to the resistance line thus I considered the resistance strong and gave the signal of either sell or sell short. At the time of working with the chart I didn’t really know if it’s actually true...but now, writing this post, 30 minutes later, the price has dropped 0.5%. See the second chart about what continued (after the blue dot). That’s again good sign, good sign for me I mean – there’s hope that one day I will be able to make right decisions, if nothing else lol.
Note that the volume on the resistance line, in place of all the four tops, was about 15-30 times bigger than the usual volume and this again, to me, seemed like a good reason to give the sell or sell short signal.
Now, first conclusions about my analysis of the MINI stock – the main things – support, resistance, volume did help understand what it happening on the chart (even though with USD 3500 investment I lost around EUR 50 due to the 15 minute delay in buy and sell orders in the stock competition ). From negative side I must say that I wasn’t able to recognize any patterns and need to cover that material again. Also I didn’t do enough research, didn’t think about intermarket analysis etc. Right now I probably just don’t know where to find all this information in its best form, but I’ll get there!
Til’ next time.
