Quick catch (but kinda wild).

Not an official trading day, but a good opportunity to practice some quicker trading. (from the hip..) This one is on my papermoney account, but it uses the same price data as the real account.

I saw that the market was moving pretty good (some big swings), but thought I would trade, using the same ISH criteria that I would for real, but with a little quicker on the draw style in my entry.. try and catch a good swing..

the hourly was bullish so far this morning, but I thought things might take a dip.. at least down to recent lows.

The 15-minute looked about the same..

The 5-minute charts also showed that price was in bear mode at the time..

I was ready to jump in on this drop, but still wanted a bit of safety by getting a nice low delta strike price. I got the credit I wanted by increasing my strike width (wings) to 15 wide and ended up with a safe(ish) delta 9 strike.

The problem that comes with a bigger wingsize, is that any move up or down will affect the trade more than a smaller wingsize. Within minutes I was already halfway to my stop! Oh well, that's what papertrading is best at.. no real damage at all, but good experience..

I also noticed how the slope of the EMA100 (the 100 period moving average) was BULLISH at this time, and I shouldn't have traded counter to it. Let's see how it plays out.

I left the trade running and went to have some breakfast. (something I would NOT do if it were real money, but again.. paper.. :P) This is what I saw when I returned..

Oh well, it's only a loss on paper, but let's check the trade times and see how long it lasted.

I got lucky. but by not being too greedy and only going for .50 profit, the 24 minutes of the market dropping (taking a rest from the bigger bull move) was enough to win the trade.

Wait, what? The trade hit it's target and closed just before price swung up. :) Also, I just noticed how price dipped down till it just crossed the ema100 before shooting up again. Very cool.

That's the market sometimes. It's fast paced and pretty wild at times. Usually, I wouldn't risk it. I would say this trade was about 50/50. I was willing to risk the papermoney though! :P

NOTE: Even if I had caught the bigger bull trend earlier, my smallish 1X stop that I use would surely have gotten hit by any of these swings. Sometimes, it's just hit or miss.