Friday, May 19, 2006

TIE update

Open: 32.00
High: 35.95
Low: 30.99
Last: 35.95


TIE is at the highs of the day with 90 minutes to go. This is why we trade.

A

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi A:

I hope you are trading for the short term, because TIE still looks overvalued to me. First support I see is in the mid $20s.

Did you get out of FRG before it corrected? I might consider buying FRG around $3.50-$3.75 range.

Greg

A said...

Greg, you should know by now that "value" has little to do with trading. TIE was good to me today, but I'm flat now. As for FRG, the victim if a trailing stop many weeks ago and looking for an excuse to gt back in.

A

Anonymous said...

Hi Allan,

Just curious: what's your decision-making process on when to sell something like TIE? That is,

1. What criteria do you use to separate out your day trades from more longer term positions?
2. And for day trades, when do you hit the sell button? Do you have particular pleasure/pain threshold -- so much gained or lost and it's an automatic sell -- or do you play them more from the hip?

As always, thanks for the insights.

Jon

A said...

1. What criteria do you use to separate out your day trades from more longer term positions?

My day trades are based on objective application of a purely fundamental (read: not technical analysis) set of rules. Anything longer-term is seat-of-the-pants, but applying some intelligent design (I tell myself).

2. And for day trades, when do you hit the sell button?

A more difficult question. As a very general rule, once I hit a percentage gain close to the mean for that type of trade, I will apply either a hard or trailing stop. Sometimes I will initially buy a lot of shares because of the quality of the signal and sell half very quickly, leaving two trails on the other half, one tight, one loose. In other words, of the half that's left, 1/2 is subject to a tight stop, 1/2 is held at a much higher trail, in case the sucker runs and runs and runs. So for 3/4 of the trade, a la Woody Allen, Take The Money and Run.

A