Getting the ‘fish’ ready for table

I’ve been thinking much more about strategy and planning. I’m appreciating even more how the fruits to be had from this approach. This hit home really well when on Friday 25th July 2015, I achieved a good profit on some trades, shown below.

On reflection what I did very differently was to select Athenahealth carefully a few days in advance. Amazon is a distraction and a late entrant that came up suddenly – but there will always be exceptions to any good strategy.Skyworks was carefully selected yet I was stopped out. That’s the name of the game. The unpredictable will happen. 

As Daryl Guppy said, “I have no control over where price may go. All I have control over is how much I’m prepared to lose.” And Linda Raschke said, “We can more often predict direction but not magnitude of price movement.”  In retrospect what happened with Skyworks was that investors dumped it as Apple stock plummeted. Skyworks is a main supplier for Apple. But let’s not be too distracted by all that.

The outcome of reflection on the last week or two has been the following plan for ‘getting the fish ready’ for serving. (I may modify this flowchart as I go). Basically, the chart shows a strategy for catching, selecting, deselecting, preparing, cooking and serving. Cooking is basically where you enter the trade and serving up is where you exit and enjoy any rewards. [The diagram is clickable for a much larger view]