Meta-Trader - 2013 Week One

Welcome back,  Meta-Traders.

Week one of 2013 is now in the books and it was an incredible week in world markets.  My portfolios finally eclipsed the highs made prior to the 2008 crash and after a 5 year correction my net worth is now at new all-time highs!   Don't confuse brains with a bull market of course since we had new multi-year highs in some of the indices.

As for equities, we had nice gains in Facebook (FB) and Research in Motion (RIMM).  RIMM is in a much better buying position now since it just had a bull-elephant bar on the daily chart after a reasonable consolidation period.  Also, they are releasing their Blackberry 10 device shortly and there is a lot of pent-up demand for their devices on the corporate side since they have not released a new device in about 2 years.

Also, I think there is a lot of fatigue with Apple Computer APPL, and the stock continues to behave like crap and weigh on the Nasdaq.  But its clear to me that Apple is last year's story and the baton has been passed to Facebook and RIMM for tech gainers of 2013.

I also started a position in Mastercard (MA) which recently cleared $500 and looks a lot like Apple did last year at this time.   The move from cash and check-based transactions to credit cards is a monster trend which continues to grow.  For example, I now pay my cable television, cell-phone and whatever other expenses I can through a credit card.  Why? Because its essentially a free 30-day interest-free loan - plus I get 1% or more rebate on whatever I spend.  Its free money as long as you pay on time which fortunately is not a problem for me.  Also on the receiving end are credit card giants, Mastercard (MA) and Visa (V).  Mastercard is not cheap at $530 a share, so I'm starting small with 10-share blocks.

And speaking of starting small, I'm trading like a complete wimp in my new TradeStation account.  How much of a wimp?  I bought an EBAY 55 call for $6 and sold it for $18 a day later!  After fees and commissions, that was a $9.71 profit on an investment of $7.04!   In retrospect, that was somewhat lucky trade since the pop occurred on an analyst upgrade of BIDU which caused a sudden, sharp rally above $54 which faded almost immediately thereafter giving me a perfect opportunity to take profit.  In the interest of honesty, I bought the same contract for $2 on Thursday and it expired worthless on Friday.

More typical was a day trade in the RIMM on Friday where I bought the January 12 call for $125 and solid it for $137 11 minutes later!   The cool part about this trade its that I was up about $15 with 2-3 minutes of getting into this trade.  I didn't want to give back any profits, but wanted to let it run, so I put in a 0.05 trailing stop and walked away to get some cleaning supplies.  Within a few short minutes, I heard the platform speak "Order Filled" and I was out with my $10 profit!  Finally I have been unleashed from the commissions and slowness of the Web-based E*Trade platform, and I'm working with some solid trading technology!  But I don't want to keep chasing nickels.  So my plan is to get the account up a few hundred dollars, then up position size and start playing with the houses's money.

On the Forex side, we had a pretty good week.  We took a monster, 220-pip profit from Teyacanani in my AT#1 and AT  #3 accounts.  Sunqu currently has a 3% open profit in a long position in EUR/USD.  3 of the 4 Forex accounts have open long positions in EUR/USD, so hopefully we can get some further upside action next week.

Also on Forex, recall that my study Fun with Forex Historical shows that the 2nd week of January has more average movement than any other week of the year over the prior 20 years. So we don't expect these results to continue, but sometimes luck plays a factor, and we are certainly overdue for some luck with our Forex accounts since everything seems to have gone against us in 2012.

Back to the Tradestation platform, I have coded my foundational trending indicator "Range Bands" which I consider the ultimate trend indicator.  I will share the EasyLanguage code.  I will also consider making it a Meta-Trader indicator and an associated Expert Advisor.  However, I don't expect it be very profitable in Forex, which is just too whippy and has too many false breakouts.   More to come on that, maybe tomorrow.

That's enough for now, enjoy your weekend!