Thursday, October 12, 2006

A Lesson in Liquidity & Execution

I have to share this with you. If you've been paying attention to my current position updates you knew that I entered a short position on SVN on Monday. You may have also noticed Trader Charlie's question about volume on his comment and read my response to his comment (check out the comments on: Re: Mark I like your BLOG! - Trade Seeker Question...). Good, I'm glad you're paying attention.

Aside the scant volume SVN sees, I followed my trading rules. I got stopped out today and bought back the short sale (sold for $6.73 on 10/9) for $6.708. You must be wondering why I'm excited about getting a mere 0.18% gain (after Cost of Trade). Take a look at this single-day 2-minute interval chart on SVN for today:

The black line is where my stop was located at $6.70 (3 cents better than break-even). And, yes I could have been justified in lowering my stop a couple more pennies based on this intraday chart and bailed once it violated the previous high after all that consolidation/no movement. I actually put some limit orders in to scale out of the position yesterday and today, but I was a little too optimistic and set the price too low to execute. There's a ton of what-ifs. I chose to set my stop at $6.70 and was waiting until I saw today's closing price to adjust from there. Anyway, let's move on...

Notice the volume, it is appalling. I did say I may live to regret this trade because of the thin volume. Given the complete lack of volume when the stock crossed the black line (my stop) I was convinced my order would be filled for a loss and I'd be buying back the stock at the blue line for ~$6.80. However, when I pulled up my Interactive Brokers account, I could see that IB filled my order for an average price of $6.708 (it executed across 3 exchanges, one at $6.70, and two at $6.71) which turned what I was certain was a loss into a gain.

Once again, I'm asking myself: What have I learned? ... Liquidity is good, learn to love it and don't be sucked in my a low volume stock just because it has a few higher-volume days under it's belt. Turn up the volume! The other thing I learned is that Interactive Brokers has terrific execution. Any questions?

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