Trader Mike

You know how I love the money management aspects of trading — here’s a must-read article by Michael Taylor on scaling out of trades.

I’ve gotta write another one of these reminders to myself to take partial profits. I had a real nice trade going early this morning when I bought 1,000 shares of NYNY at $4.94 (I took the ‘dummy‘ entry as it rose above the highs of the 9:45 candle). The stock proceeded to run towards $6 over the next 30 minutes and I was pushing my stop up the whole time to lock in about a third of the gains. I noticed that there was resistance on the daily chart near $6 but since the market was getting stronger I figured I could just let it try to run with the market. Silly me! …

I decided to sell half of my PARL position yesterday once it hit a 10% gain. Taking partial profits is something that I’ve got to get better about doing, especially in choppy markets. I still want to try to let my winners run but at the same time I don’t want to give back too much of my gains. I think that taking a portion of the profits is a good middle ground. That’s something that I should have done with my ASKJ short last week after it gapped down the day after I shorted it. I had about a 8% gain but I ended up with only about 3% after it gapped up the …