Evening Wrap Up

Well, as you can see from my Stockalicious widget, I had another killer day. The account closed today at a year-to-date high, putting me up ~9%. While that peformance is really nothing spectacular (it is beating the Nasdaq and S&P, but not the Dow), I feel like throwing sand in the eyes of the stock gods, and celebrating this recent spell of success. I will start by posting a stockalicious chart which shows my performance since I started logging all my trades with stockalicious.

Next, I want to post two charts which show my recent success at buying the bottom of a dip. Buying counter-trend has been very difficult for me in the past. I typically used to only buy strength. Lately I have had success buying short-term bottoms. If I continue to be successful with this type of entry, I will certainly need to pair it with a good system for exiting.

Finally, I want to post a chart which I really like. Downtowntrader posted this chart last week. I post it because its pretty, because I have a position in it (hey, I don't make jack from my ads, at least let me pump my own positions) and because I want someone to speculate on why the chart shows such strength when a follow-on offering of 5 million shares was just priced. Any ideas? My experience is typically that any dilution is met with selling. Not so in this case.

Doing My Numbers With Stockalicious

For the week, the account was up 1.5%, or $1,667.00.

Year to date, the account is up 6.5%

Although I've used the Stockalicious trading journal/portfolio tool for only 1 month, I've generated enough data for for their charts to begin illustrating some interesting information about my account. The first screenshot shows my account versus the indexes.


The next screen shot features a new tool Stockalicious has implemented. This tool, accessible from the "Trades" tab, allows the trader to enter trades with stop losses, and tracks R (risk) for each trade. This is a great new feature, and as always with Stockalicious, the interface is easy to use.


Although I used screenshots to save my readers the legwork, my portfolio is open to all. Just click on "Woodshedder" in the widget. Anyone at anytime can see what I'm trading, and check out the statistics I'm generating.

There are two other trading bloggers that I know of using the Stockalicious widget: Mdawsz over at Get Short, and Iio at Stock Logic. Stop by their blogs and check out their Stockalicious widgets to see how their trades are working out.

Stockalicious- Part 3

If you haven't checked out their site yet, you are missing the best online stock journaling tool! Also, Stockalicious is very open to suggestions. They even have an I Hate You section where one can say what they hate about the site. Rather than explaining the latest changes made to the portfolio tool, I will repaste an email from the Stockalicious crew.

Hi Woodshedder,

The total and average profit figures for all positions have been introduced to our website. You should be able to see it in your portfolio at the bottom of the positions now. Also, we have just introduced a cash balance feature to calculate your portfolio value. You should now be able to see the cash balance in your portfolio page. You can set this to any amount and we will calculate the daily portfolio gain/loss % against the cash value + stock value, better reflecting the real world trading/investment experience.

For your convenience, every time you add a SELL transaction, we will add the transaction amount to the cash balance. Conversely, every time you add a BUY transaction, we will deduct the transaction amount from the cash balance.

Cheers,
The Stockalicious Team

Stockalicious Part 2

In a quick review of the Stockalicious widget and portfolio tool I suggested I would like to be able to add commissions and be able to see profits in $$$, not just percentages. The very same day the crew had made the changes.

Hovering the cursor over the percentages listed in the widget now opens a small pop-up window with the actual gains or losses in dollars. It really is sexy. And for trading while working, it makes it easy to get a quick read on how the portfolio is doing.

The crew also made it easy to enter commissions for every trade.

Having tried to record trades in many other web-based portfolio tools, I have usually found the applications to be inefficient, cumbersome, and generally not very fun to work with. The result has always been that I quit using the tool. I'm finding the Stockalicious site to be a very efficient tool for logging trades. And I dare say it is almost fun to use, which is a great thing because it will make it more enjoyable to journal every trade and track account statistics.

Stockalicious!

I have searched several weeks for a widget to display my portfolio holdings and update gains (or in my case, losses) in real-time. I experimented with the widgets Yahoo and Google offer to track stocks, as well as some user modified versions. They did not do what I wanted, and I found that they were hard to update and maintain.

Then I found Stockalicious. Even if you do not desire a widget for the general public to monitor your portfolio, you should still check out their homepage. While I think their widget is really freaking cool, a visit to the homepage will show you that Stockalicious has much more to offer for traders and investors.

The portfolio tool is easy to use, and allows one to log purchases at multiple prices. While the widget only displays the average at which all shares were purchased, there is another tab for the portfolio owner which will display each purchase separately. While I have not used the "sell" function yet, I understand that it allows one to track sells to see what happened to the stock price days or weeks after the sell.

I emailed Stockalicious because the standard widget they provide did not fit well into my sidebar. I received a very cordial email from them several hours later (on a Sunday, no less) with the new code.

The only suggestions I have for Stockalicious is to allow the user to include commissions, and I would like the tool to calculate actual dollar figures for profits and losses, rather than only percentage gains or losses. This would save me a few seconds on the calculator, and would truly make their portfolio tool a one-stop shop for managing trades.

All in all, this is a really cool widget backed by a very well-done web site.