Steady as she goes

The last day of November brings a steady market which is up 6 at 12.29 pm, having shaken off some early weakness after US and European markets failed to rally as strongly as we'd hoped. My book is quite reflective of the action with PDN and RSG having gone for a run and then topped out, temporarily I hope. In the meantime IPL is holding on with a minor rise and PRU is picking itself up after early weakness on fairly light volume.

This month I moved to more of a trade on close approach. My signals are tweaked but little changed from what I've typically used and stops or profit targets can be executed intraday. It's been a very positive move for me and starts to fulfil a long held ambition of limiting my time at the screens and reducing the number of decisions to be made on any one day in order to simplify and calm my trading. I've been able to use that extra time usefully and enjoyably and results are promising.

BLD threatened to slip away to new lows after breaking support around 342. However, the stock seems to be pulling away from that level following a slow turnaround. A strong finish and I'll buy some with a stop at 338.

4.13 Window dressing, perhaps, as the market matched well to close up 18 at 4120 while Asian markets were generally quite weak and US futures the same. Despite that theme, I bought some BLD at 350 and SEK at 573 on a 1-2-3 signal.

I had a rather galling experience this afternoon when I stopped out of IPL at 314 after it triggered a trailing stop with a reasonable amount of volume at 313. The stock recovered to finish quite well at 321 and since this has happened a handful of times over the last couple of weeks, I'm starting to draw some conclusions so that the lesson isn't wasted.

The main one is that I might be wise to wait till the end of day to stop out, unless there's a more serious break. In this case, that would have been trades below last Friday's low of 309. Equally – and this is something that I'd planned to do – it's generally better to be patient while you wait for the move to happen if you've got in on a false start and only bring the stops in tighter if the position has been running for a while.

Since this is something that will move more of my trading to an end of day basis and reduces stress, it's a good move for me. I spent some time deciding whether or not to cut the IPL – as I did with AWC and FMG in recent days – and, in the end, I made the wrong decision.

To sum up, I don't want to waste time, money or emotional energy. Therefore, when cutting or taking profits, I should use my initial stop if a trade is unresolved but I think the scenario still has potential to go my way and when it's performing, I can use my target sales as security and otherwise try to use end of day levels as much as possible.