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Here’s a list of the interesting up/down gappers from my Prophet.net scan. This list is one of my main sources for potential daytrades, and it serves as a great starting point. I can’t run the scan until after market open, so I’ll try to post the list before 0900:

Up Gappers: ACOR, ALA, AMGN, ASTE, ATHR, AXE, COH, FSH, IAAC, IDIX, JBLU, LCAV, LMRA, MT, NFLX, NG, TZOO, UCTT, UTHR, VLTR

Down Gappers: ABFS, AMTD, ARNA, BUCY, CINF, CS, DSPG, IIVI, MSCC, ODFL, PMTC, PNM, ROK, TAM, WCC, WRLD, ZRAN

The following is from a Motley Fool article published on Yahoo Finance:

According to managers of day-trading firms cited in a Washington Post Magazine article, about 90% of day traders “are washed up within three months.” David Shellenberger of the Massachusetts Securities Division has noted that “most traders will lose all of their money.” A principal of a day-trading firm even admitted that “95% will fail in the first two years.” Former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Arthur Levitt recommends that people day trade only with “money they can afford to lose.”

What… are these figures supposed to be shocking? With every Tom, Dick and Harry trying his hand at day trading the same way he tries his hand at p*ker in Vegas (i.e. unprepared, overconfident and thinks it’s easy), I think most folks who have done any volume of trading at all (day, swing or otherwise) would say “90% washed up in three months” for pure day trading is optimistic.

A couple of interesting charts for your viewing pleasure this evening. I’m sure I don’t need to remind anyone that tomorrow is options expiry, so we may get more action going out into the yard and watching the grass grow than we will trading.

First, a bearish engulfing pattern following a hanging man on AIV (Apartment Investment and Management):

A drop thru today’s low of 57.75 could provide us with a short entry if the market cooperates.

What if the market is raging upwards? Anything looking to break to the upside? Have a look at NEU (Newmarket Corp):

This one could provide an entry above today’s high of 65.42, but watch out for the 52-wk hi just above at 67.19. More conservative traders may wait for the break of the 52hi, or maybe go for a hybrid, putting on a partial position at the break of today’s bar and the rest if the 52hi fails.

I’ll be watching these two tomorrow, but not expecting much. The action of the overall market (or lack thereof) will be the deciding factor.

We got the test of the dollar’s July high which I had mentioned some posts back, and we failed miserably. Must’ve been the “good” PPI and CPI news.

Weaker dollars buy less stuff, or put another way, it takes more of them to buy the same stuff. Like over 60 of them for a barrel of oil and over 600 of them for an ounce of gold. Get my drift? The action in the charts of gold- and oil-related stocks confirms the situation. If you’re short, double-check that your stops are exactly where you want them; they may be called up for duty very soon.

Ah, yes. Rule No. 8 gets me again, this time for a major chop with GOOG. One day soon, I’m gonna remember this rule when I’m entering trades, not just when the trade’s over and I’m either drinking a toast to dollars lost or lovingly spooning with my trade confirmations. Nah, I don’t really do that, but there was this one trade last summer, on Google no less…

I’m not in such a sour mood. I can set position sizes hanging upside down with one hand tied behind my back, and the temptation to overcommit never bothers me anymore. My stop on GOOG was really wide (about 10 bucks), and my PS was correspondingly small. So, I’ll take a whack on this trade, but even though it’s more than I anticipated, it’s not crippling.

I shudder to think back to the days when a decision that the way to be pointed in Google was “down” would have seen me using half of my entire account’s equity to buy at-the-money puts, in which case right about now I would be in the bathroom Calling Ralph on the Big White Phone.

So, if this is the spanking that reminds me to think of that rule in the future, well, it’ll be worth it.

Finally bit the bullet last night and changed Wordpress over to “pretty permalinks.” Had been dreading it for weeks- pictures of .htaccess problems and dead websites and days of frustration.

Instead, it went pretty smoothly. CHMOD the .htaccess file to “666″ (so Satan could write to it, I suppose), then change permalink structure in Wordpress options. Simple! [I’m not calling Wordpress Satan here, they rock. I’m just pointing out that Damian from The Omen would like some of Apache’s rules.]

Or not so simple. The links changed beautifully, everything stayed intact. Changed .htaccess back. But then, lo! All my images are gone!

From way back in my HTML 1.0 days, I’ve been in the habit of using relative links in my coding. It used to be a way to save bandwidth and cut down on image-borrowing. You know, back when you paid $50/month for bandwidth measured in megabytes.

Well, with the permalink structure in place, Wordpress only wants complete “http://…” references, so all my images were gone.

So, I spent an extra couple of hours last night (after I was already a Zombie) editing all my old posts and pages, changing the links to the images.

If you view a post or page and just get the “alt” description for an image and not the image itself, that’s probably one I missed.

But don’t blame me. Blame Satan.

Worked a graveyard again last night, and had to stay up today because they’ve got me scheduled at 7 AM tomorrow! Checked the market a couple of times, but when you’re not even sure what day it is, best not to trade.

The market the last couple of weeks has been weird. The public perception is that it’s been all roses and honey, but seems like everything I touch seems to get stopped out. Think I’ll scale back my number of trades for now and just look for really solid setups. This is definitely not one of those times when you can just throw a dart and trade what it lands on.

Google’s rebound action did allow me to get my short on, even after the stupid stop limit I wrote about the other day. My stop’s just below $430 at the moment, so we’ll see if it holds.

For now, though, this funny money game continues. How long will it last? I don’t know. I do know that throughout history, all paper money has eventually come back to its true value, which is zero.

In his rather ominously-titled article The Last Days of the Dollar, columnist Robert Kiyosaki provides a good basic overview of the troubled international currency situation I love to mention at every opportunity.