Meta-Trader - Feast for the Bulls

Welcome back, Meta-Traders.

It was a feast for the bulls this week with the market screaming higher, particularly the Dow Jones Industrial Average starting with a gap into all-time high territory on Tuesday morning.   From there it was straight up with almost 3 more consecutive daily closing highs.

The SP-500 closed the week a percentage point or 2 short of new all-time high territory.  At the same time, broader market index ETF's representing the Russell 2000 (IWM) and SP-400 Mid-Cap (VO) closed the week at new all-time highs.   All this bullishness sent my net worth to new all-time highs on several days including Friday's close which is a beautiful thing of course.

One particularly memorable trade was Apple.  Recall in last week's post "Crapple," Apple was in a flush to the downside with further downside targets in the 380 area.  On Tuesday March 5th, I was watching the 5 minute bars just after the open, and saw a large bull elephant bar on the 2nd 5 minute bar of the day which had a bigger range than any 5-minute bar the day before.  I figured at about $422 the stock was good for a run back up to $428.  So I picked up 1 of the weekly $420 calls at 10.60 for about a $1060 trade size.  I quickly put a stop in at 9.60 for a max loss of $100.  The stock pulled back somewhat, but kept me in the trade, and from there Apple took off and reached an intraday high of $435 exceeding my own expectations of how high it could go.  I closed the contract out at $14.50 later that day for about a 30% profit on the contract in about 4 hours time!

I had 2 other trades this week in my Tradestation account, both winners.  But I closed both of them at the market price and thus gave back the spread.  Had a been a little more patient and used limit orders, I could have made closer to $100 each, but ended up making only about $70 each. So I need to improve my game there and use the feature of TradeStation where I put a stop loss and take profit order on each position before entry. Once entered, the trade can play out as planned instead of the "seat of the pants" management style I am using now.
In any case, I'm doing well in my TradeStation account and up about 7.8% for the year.

One strange thing that happened this week was that CNBC took over Nightly Business Report, my favorite daily business news show on Public Broadcasting.  As it turns out, CNBC sacked most of the NBR staff including host Tom Hudson and replaced him with Tyler Matheson.  They did hold onto Suzy Garib and she is now co-host as shown in this the shot with Tyler M.

The strange part is that I used to count on NBR to give me an unbiased, non-commercial news of business news.  Now instead I see the same CNBC personalities on NBR that I see all day long on CNBC which feels wierd.  Nothing against CNBC since I get a lot of great information from them.  Its just that another perspective has been lost as NBR has been consumed into the media giant CNBC which is now owned by cable giant Comcast after having been spun off by General Electric last year.

I am not one to complain, since there is more information available now (more every day) than there ever was before in the history of the world and much of it is accessible for no cost over the Internet.  Free is always transformational and the Internet has made new industries and new economies just as old ones (like newspapers and print media) die on the vine.

That's all for now, enjoy your week and get some rest.