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Only made one trade today, then had to go to ICK! the full-time job and work until 10pm. Have to be back first thing in the morning, so this is going to be short and sweet.

In the one day a week I get to daytrade, I’ve evolved something of a system. StrategyDesk, with all its shortcomings, has made quite a difference in that system. This morning, I ran my old faithful Prophet.net scan for up-gappers with good volume. As usual, it returned about 15-20 stocks (actually, a little lower than normal). Since I’m using the free version, I didn’t get my list until around 0950 EST, which is fine as I don’t normally trade before then anyway.

Next, I made a custom symbol list from those results and loaded it in a realtime screener in StrategyDesk. It was very similar to the one I described a few posts back, and is solely designed to make my job easier. This one looks for a couple of simple things that I would previously have had to manually and constantly scan for (very labor-intensive):

• A series of lower lows where the last one closes within 1% of the 5ema

• A current bar that is threatening to break the previous bar’s high (I just have it look for “Last Price >50% of the prior bars range”)

The screener only kicked out a few stocks, exactly as it should have on a day like today. The list would only be from 0-4 stocks long at any given time… most of the time it was empty. I drank coffee, checked the Market Overview, read/wrote some email, played a little guitar.. then when a symbol would pop up, I’d look at the charts on multiple timeframes (both StrategyDesk and Quotetracker), and within about 10 seconds I’d be back to drinking and playing.

Finally it kicked out COO (The Cooper Companies) on the 1100 EST bar, and it was a beauty:

I simply entered when the 1100 bar broke the 1030 bar’s high of 46.60, set the low of the entry bar (46.30) as my initial stop, and let ‘er go. She went up nicely. I had to sell on the 1130 bar, because I had to go to (choke, puke) work and couldn’t practice my stop-trailing. However, I made a nice little gain in about 30-40 minutes, and as it turns out, I didn’t miss out on much until that big run at the close.

Ah, low-stress trading. I could get used to this.