Open positions for July 28th

Here is the status of my current holdings:

Symbol	Entry Date	Entry Price	Current Price	Profit %
SATC	05/05/2008	1.86	2.35	26.34
GILT	27/05/2008	10.79	10.90	1.02
IRET	9/6/2008	10.37	10.25	-1.16
SHLM	7/6/08	22.06	23.07	2.08

Open positions for July 24th

Here is the status of my current holdings:

Symbol	Entry Date	Entry Price	Current Price	Profit %
SATC	05/05/2008	1.86	2.35	26.34
GILT	27/05/2008	10.79	10.91	1.11
IRET	9/6/2008	10.37	10.31	-0.58
SHLM	7/6/08	22.06	23.23	2.79

Open positions for July 8th

Last week continued the negative movement we witnessed its prior week. SATC took a big hit and dropped to 32.80% but no stop signal was given. RCCC got a time based sell signal. I hold the stock for almost six months in which almost no movement had been seen. I sold the stock yesterday at 44.35.

Here is the status of my current holdings:

Symbol	Entry Date	Entry Price	Current Price	Profit %
RCCC	22/01/2008	44.13	44.35	0.49
SATC	05/05/2008	1.86	2.47	32.80
GILT	27/05/2008	10.79	10.86	0.65
IRET	9/6/2008	10.37	9.55	-7.91
EPMD	23/6/2008	2.97	3.01	1.35

Open positions for June 30

It’s been a volatile week which sadly ended badly. TSYS is about to sell today due to stop loss. IRETS is not looking very good as well and hopefully it will recover during the week. If you followed SATC you probably saw how volatile its behavior has been.

Here is the status of my current holdings:

Symbol	Entry Date	Entry Price	Current Price	Profit %
RCCC	22/01/2008	44.13	44.57	1.00
SATC	05/05/2008	1.86	3.01	61.83
GILT	27/05/2008	10.79	10.87	0.74
IRETS	9/6/2008	10.37	9.64	-7.04
TSYS	16/6/2008	5.19	4.61	-11.18
EPMD	23/6/2008	2.97	2.99	0.67

Buy signal for June 23rd

A new buy signal was received from the system for EP MedSystems (EPMD).

If you’ll look at the chart below you can see it had a major move 11 weeks ago where it gained around 84%. Despite the steep climb the stock has seen higher prices.

I intend to buy EPMD during the next trading day.

Open positions for June 23rd

Here is the status of my current holdings:

Symbol	Entry Date	Entry Price	Current Price	Profit %
RCCC	22/01/2008	44.13	44.79	1.50
SATC	05/05/2008	1.86	3.29	76.88
GILT	27/05/2008	10.79	10.85	0.56
IRETS	9/6/2008	10.37	10.35	-0.19
TSYS	16/6/2008	5.19	4.87	-6.17

How to make sure you’re in a trend?

My system tries to identify whether the market is currently in a trend. For the human eye discovering whether the market or a specific stock is in a trend is relatively easy. Just look at the graph and if the line goes up or down then chances are it is in a trend.

Discovering whether the stock is in trend helps filter the signals generated when the trend is opposite to your system’s trend. I.e if I build a system which trade only bullish market, I need to disregard all trades generated when the stock was in a bearish move.

When building a computerized system things become a bit complicated and my way of overcoming this problem was to measure the values of two close prices, one for the current day and one in the past x days. If the current’s day closing price was higher than the closing price of the other closing price I assumed I’m in a bullish period.

Running a test for this rule did eliminate lots of false trades however, I encountered another problem. There were times when the closing price of the current day was higher than the closing price of the previous measured period but only due to a peak in the price. Meaning, the stock was in the opposite trend but the system used two prices which gave resulted in a false signal. The way I overcome this problem was to measure the two periods on a moving average of the closing price rather on the price itself.

That did the trick. obviously you would need to find the right period for the moving average since using small period will make the moving average act like the closing price series and large period might be too slow and the system can miss the trend or enter too late.

If you have any other questions about computerized system, please let me know.