Taking more out...

Of course, as we start the day, nobody has any idea how that day will turn out. Being a trader, it's extremely difficult to prepare yourself "well" for the day. If you have been in this game for as long as we have, the hardest part of the trading is to anticipate a market "turn". Sometimes you just go with your market sense, sometimes all this is, is your gut. Well, we feel today's action is discouraging at best. The action from indices may be deceiving as there's really no sense of urgency of cashing out. We feel that under the circumstance, it's best to be more cautionary as oppose to hunky dory. Maybe it's just us, but we definitely feel that certain plays are getting a little bit tired. All this might be coinciding with the driving force recently and that is earning season is wrapping up. How can we tell? We watch the combination of volume + price action and their behaviour relative to the overall market. Many if not most of our trading decisions are based on our past experience, and so we decided to reduce our exposure about mid way through the day. On the other hand, if the market decides to give it another quick push, we'd be there quickly and do our part. As always, buying decision is far more easier and quicker to execute than selling. At this point, we think weve had a great earning season, we are not about to get lackadaisical look on our faces watching our profits wilt.
There is a couple of stock setups which we feel we need to mention today and let's get right to them...
NGA, this co., oddly enough, announced that they are going to have a 3 for 2 split. In our opinion, what the heck is the management thinking? Yes, we definitely do not like this announcement and we reduced most of our position earlier during the day. The stock, in our opinion, is liquid enough which does not require a split to attract more "investors". We don't go with management reasoning this will make NGA more liquid and available to investors, including institutions of course. 3 for 2, just doesn't cut it. Funny thing also, we'd also highly doubt that most of traders who are involved in this stock are long term investors. In our experience, companies which have announced split at this price level have not fared well, most of the time. Of course, we aren't just going to ditch this play for good and stick to our emotional opinion. The IBD play is still on target but we'd be more cautious if we decide to get back into this one again.
CROX, if it wasn't for the weakness of the overall market, we might have been a bit more aggressive with this one. Nonetheless, this one had a new closing high and we added a few times to day, including near the end of day.
MTOX, this one actually turned out to be possibly the best trade of the day. We threw out the 'lead' before 10am and soon were in it mid 26's for a run to 28. When you have a nice quick gain and the market shows signs of a turn, you have no choice but to give up your new pick. Maybe..we should have bought back end of day as it fell back down to low 26's, but we were just not in the mood to get cheeky.
SPAN, RCCC, NTLS, AFAM, these recent alert plays are humming along quietly in the background and we've used that to sell some just in case. These have been secondary plays in sizes as the NGA, IDSA's, LXU etc. have been the primary plays lately. We still have some scattered shares of these, but it is nothing that can do any sort of damage to us.
ERS, we picked up some AH's, just couldn't ignore the 40% revenue increase with the stock hovering near recent low's. This could be just a flip into any strength tomorrow. We'll see if there is any appetite for this old gamer.