Trader’s Narrative

Since I last mentioned WallStreak, Ugly has made incremental improvements to the site. And I hear more are coming in the near future. Eventhough I don’t always post, I’ve been checking out Wallstreak.com during the trading day.

If you’re not familiar with it, WallStreak is an online hangout (chatroom) for traders during the day. Most of the time individual traders point out interesting setups, potential opportunities and during luls, they just chit-chat about the market and everything else under the sun.

It is completely free and no one is there to sell signals or calls. It is a community of traders helping traders. Similar to the trading blog community. But obviously, during the trading day, it isn’t practical to blog about an opportunity or chart setup since by the time you do, it’s over!

The value added of WallStreak is near instantaneous communication between traders. For example, during the recent NASDAQ quote problems, the first source to confirm it was Wallstreak. Then came TV news (CNBC), bloggers and other online sources.

Right now there are about 10 regulars but it is growing every week. Registering will give you a username and an account with which you can customize WallStreak settings. For example, you can set up a watchlist and share it with others. But if you prefer to dip your toes in the water first, you can simply post anonymously.

Even a luddite like me is beginning to recognize that WallStreak has significant potential as a tool. In the short term, I can see it growing to a few dozen regular participants with around 10 times that many people just lurking and reading. My very premature concern is that as it grows there may be too much chatter and the “signal” may be lost in the “noise”. But Ugly’s got some tricks up his sleeve.

For example, you can use a blacklist to exclude eveybody except a few individuals - in essence, setting up your own “room” within WallStreak or you can whitelist everyone and then filter their contributions out if you deem them to not be a noteworthy.

And while it is an informal place, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t intelligent calls. I’m not saying that you should jump on evey ticker mentioned on WallStreak. You have to do your own thinking and have an edge. On top of that, it is helpful to have more than one set of eyes and minds watching the market and sharing insights. Anyway, here are the two examples.

The first one was on May 7th, 2007 when Hansen Natural Corp. (HANS) had a scheduled conference call. On WallStreak, Richard pointed out that HANS was acting “jittery”.

Click to Enlarge Graph:

The other example is from yesterday when an anonymous user pointed out Merck (MRK). Their comments are appended to the graph below.

Click to Enlarge Graph:

Hmmm… Merck. Rings a bell.

Two days ago I offered a chart and asked whether you would buy it or not. Rather than reveal it in the comments section as promised before, I decided to make a new post to show you the price action that followed:

For those keeping score:

• Eyal went long with a trailing stop above $7
• Michael preferred to stand aside but ‘gun to the head’ he went short (and was stopped out)
• Idempotent tried to short it below $6 but never got the chance since HANS never saw that handle again
• Yunis stood aside
• Chad went long with a stop at the trendline and got stopped out in the $40-$50 range
• Pradeep went long and targeted $20 (which he might have gotten if he held on through the July pullback)
• and finally, Mousefinger went long and is assumed to be still munching on a massive block of cheese he bought with the profits

Thanks to all who participated!

If you haven’t taken a look at Hansen’s long term (monthly) chart, go ahead and do so. You’ll find that from mid-1998 to mid-2003 it was going sideways. Boring if you were trading the stock but if you happened to come in later, you would have appreciated the massive base that it built. Without it, I don’t think it would have been able to launch such a rocket to the moon.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to find the ‘next HANS’. It is out there, biding its time, waiting to be discovered. Fire up the filters!