Trades of the Week: Jan 15 - Jan 19, 2024

My first week of vacation in Australia has been great for my trading account.  Maybe I should stay on vacation. Hmm...

I carried AMD & TEAM over the weekend.

AMD jumped 8.3% on Tuesday and kept creeping higher throughout the week.  I was supposed to be asleep when it gapped up Thursday morning but I'm still dealing with jet lag & I happened to wake up and see the move.  I decided to close out the position for a few reasons:

So I figured it was a good time to set it free.  Here's the chart I posted last week:

And here's the updated chart:

The trade as a whole, averaging both partial sales, netted 4.46R (or 5.26%).  I made $11 per share on the first sale and $30 per share (21.7%) on the second sale.

I entered several other trades during the week but only one of them triggered, which was:

SMCI

This trade can be classified as it's better to be lucky than good!  I saw SMCI on the Non-ADX 1,2,3,4 Pullback scan on the night of the 17th.   I put in my standard buy stop limit order and went to bed.  SMCI gapped over my limit but pulled back and I got filled.  Here's part 1 of the luck -- it kept falling and came to within a dollar of my stop loss before it bounced a bit:

Part 2 of the luck is that SMCI pre-announced earnings after the close.  When I woke up and checked my account I saw that news and that it had a big surge in after-hours trading. So it gapped up Friday morning and kept going -- it's up 37% as I type this!  Once again, I happened to wake up in the middle of the night (Australian time) and saw the huge gain (~5R) and immediately sold half of my shares. 

So I bought SMCI at 322.27, sold half 91 points higher at 413.08 and am still holding the other half of the shares.  That's a 5.75R gain (~ 5.4%) in two days.  We'll see what it becomes whenever I sell the other half of the shares. 

Also, I'd like to point out that both AMD and SMCI are very high priced stocks.  People who think high priced stocks don't move well should take note!

So AMD & SMCI (and TEAM, which I'm still holding) gave me an 8.55% gain for the week and brought my YTD returns to 14.5%.

And my 12 month returnis now above 58%:

This is why I joked that I should stay on vacation.  I can only hope this pace keeps up throughout the year.  I know it won't but one can dream...