Tokyo Trader

OMG. Just shoot me. Now please.

Knowing our different ‘tastes’ in music (if you can call what Dino has ‘taste’), I’m sure he’ll think this is just groovy.

bjork-hyper ballad

Wow - the Dow manages to push higher ahead of the long weekend, and the Nikkei still managed to close lower. The 28 point drop isn’t as bad as it could have been, for most of the afternoon the Nikkei was down over 100 points. The Nikkei has now lost ground for 12 straight days, and is now in a tie for the longest such stretch of negative days since 1953. With no trading in the US ahead of the long weekend and absolutely no news encouraging people to buy, I would not be surprised at all if we broke the record next Monday.

The market actually started out fairly strong, at one point I remember thinking that this might be one of those days where we get a 300 point bounce. Twas’ not to be. Real estate led the way down, with a whole rash of stocks including Urban (8868), DaVinci (4314), Sun Frontier (8934), Joint Corp (8874) and Kenedix (4321) all hit limit-lows during the day - news on the street was that rumors of possible bankruptcies among one of the real estate firms was making the rounds of trading desks, and the result was wide-spread panic selling. Unfortunately, I’ll have more to talk about regarding Urban and DaVinci later.

Anyway - I had a crappy day of trading. Some bad luck involved for sure. The worst was Urban. It was down early in the morning, but seemed to be consolidating. It’s a cheap stock, so I jumped in with double my normal position size - at the time, I was thinking that this might be a big day for the Nikkei, and I think I was overly eager to not miss out on a big move (especially having missed the Mixi move over the past few days). Well - not long after, the stock starting falling - with authority - and by the time I had my sell order filled it was for a $350 loss. Now - it could have been much, much worse, because - and this is huge - Okasan Online’s trading platform currently DOESN’T HAVE TRIGGER ORDERS. Which means you have to watch every position like a hawk and manually input sell orders. It meant I ended up getting hit with much larger losses than I normally would on a bunch of positions - an Y8,000 hit on Mixi (2121), a Y9,000 hit on DeNA (2432) and a Y5,000 hit on Ina Research (2176) and  - because it seemed like every stock I had that started falling would plummet eight or nine ticks at a time. Not having a trigger or other trailing-stop safeguard is really kind of scary in this environment.

Anyway - Urban ended up going all the way to its limit-low of the day. In other words - had I not managed to get out where I did, I’d be looking at a loss of over $900 on that position alone. Ouch. So, silver lining, and all that.

Urban actually ended up trading off the limit low - albeit only barely. Clearly the stock was swept along in the panic selling I noted above that hit pretty much the entire Real Estate sector. Even more frustrating - I had to force myself to dump half of my DaVinci (4314) swing position since it hit my stop. I’m really bummed about it - the stock’s P/E is now barely 6x, and I’m pretty damn sure the stock will zoom right back up next week. But I’d rather have a $800 down day than risk another $3,000 down day, since I haven’t had any good string of success lately. And the three-day weekend coming up. Better safe than sorry.

The flip side, by taking the small hit on the DaVinci position now (about $300), I give myself some room to buy back in at the current level if I choose next Monday.

So all in all, a lousy way to end the week - and now I have to **gag** put up bad music. Man, that’s the worst part of having a down day. Hopefully we’ll get some relief from this seriously bearish market next week.

Chart of the Day

I noted the nasty long-term down trend in Urban a few days ago. It got even worse today. DaVinci (4314), meanwhile is down over 30% in the last three weeks.

Today’s stats

Lots of red today…

Gross: -Y78,522
Net:-Y80,922
Shares: 2,717
# of trades: 14 (W6 L8)
Best: Japan Wind Development (2766), +Y11,000
Worst: Urban (8868), -Y34,000
Avg R: -1.16
P/L for month: -Y77,120
Avg R for month: -0.27
Holdings: DaVinci (4314) @ Y67,100, Kyoei (5440) @ Y1,960, Mixi (2121) @ Y691,000

Jorge: $340, on 7 contracts traded
David:$188, on 6 contracts traded
Sage: $178, on 20 contracts traded
Denarii: $123, on 1,200 shares traded
Tokyo: $54, on 2,330 shares traded

Some new names in the VO from today. Sage is a part-time trader based in Asia, his blog is here.  David is a Nikkei futures trader based in Singapore, his blog is here.

The entire VO was green yesterday, which is good to see. The futures/options traders trashed us lowly stock traders today. I’m guessing tomorrow will be fairly slow with the holiday in the US.

David has put together a site that allows any trader who signs up to insert his daily P/L. Check it out here: http://www.tradingarcade.com/menu.html This has some great possibilities - the obvious, people can submit their P/Ls for all to see any time, regardless of timezone, and without having to wait for someone on the other end to do something. Sign up and try it out, and let David know of any ideas or suggestions. I don’t think it will necessarily completely replace the blog post-style VO, but there are a lot of ways David’s site could really extend what the VO can do in terms of bringing together traders and their daily data.

I was expecting more comments from the peanut gallery on yesterday’s bad music selection, but it must have scared everyone away.

I made money today - not much, but enough to let me post good music. Whew. Having to find crappy music yesterday was a painful experience. Root canal work seemed enjoyable by comparison.

The video suggests these guys might be a good band to see live. Breaking Benjamin - Breath

My first day with Okasan Online, and free trading! It makes scalping extremely easy. Unlimited trades means you can scalp $10 here and there all day and not worry about costs - sweet. I’m still getting used to the new trading platform - which is considerably different from the E*Trade Japan platform I’ve been using - so that cut down on the number of trades I entered into, tho. The platform is decent - some things I don’t like, some things that are just different, and some things are actually quite nice. I’ll do a bit more thorough review once I’ve put it fully through its paces.

Another thing that made it tough today was since my Okasan account is only set up for cash trades, it really limits the stocks and position sizes I could take. Hopefully my margin account will be open by early next week.

The Nikkei itself was - confused. It was up, it was down, it was unchanged, back down again, up modestly - and that’s just the morning session. After 10 straight days of losses - first time the Nikkei’s done that since the 60’s - I suspect people were looking for any excuse to buy and give sentiment a reason to turn around, but it was for naught, as the Nikkei ended the day lower yet again. 11 days straight runing now. Last time that happened in Japan was back when Stalin died in 1953.

There was an almost perfect 50-50 split for winning sectors and losing sectors, reflecting the general ‘tread water’ state of the overall market. Financials led the way -  the sector was up 1.63%, MUFG (8306) was up almost 3%, and SMFG (8316) and Mizuho (8411) were up over 2%. I was kicking myself over my trade in Orix (8591) early in the morning. It was down around Y350 to Y10,140 or so in the morning. I picked it up, looking for a quick scalp. Instead it ran down to Y10,050 or so, so I bailed for a $20 loss. I forget about it, turn to other things. I check back again with Orix in the afternoon - and the POS stock is up Y360 on the day - that’s an Y800 point swing! Multiply that by my 20 shares, and it’s a $160 trade on a fairly small position. Damn.

Real estate was the second strongest sector. My DaVinci (4314) holdings didn’t do much all day, but a number of REITs did quite well. Bringing up the rear were glass/ceramics, wholesale, and steel - Kyoei Steel (5440), one of my old standbys, was down over Y80 today. It’s on my watch list for tomorrow.

I’m happy to be in the black for the day, however - having to choose crappy music to put up is -painful-. Stay tuned for much better tunes today…

Chart of the Day

What else? Has to be the Orix play.

Today’s stats:

Gross: +Y5,400
Net:+Y5,400
Shares: 2,330
# of trades: 12 (W7 L5)
Best: Japan Wind Development (2766), +Y4,000
Worst: Orix (8591), -Y2,000
Avg R: +0.15
P/L for month: +Y3,802
Avg R for month: +0.09
Holdings: DaVinci (4314) @ Y70,000, AxelMark (3624) @ Y207,000, Japan Wind (2766) @ Y328,000

Jorge: $1,219, on 17 contracts traded
Denarii: $97, on 9,100 shares traded
Tokyo: -$192, on 210 shares traded
Edwin: -$2,433, on 28,400 shares traded

And. the Dow manages to shed almost 2% overnight. That’s particularly disappointing, because it looks like the market was holding on to a modest gain up until the last hour or so. The VO got chopped up a bit, except Jorge, who pulled in some good coin on a bunch of options contracts, the big wins were in Legg Mason and Cypress Semicon. Edwin gave back a third of his Tuesday gains - sounds like he got caught by surprise by the sudden reversal in financials.

VO Stats
Week: +$5,804
Month: +$5,804

You know the drill - lose money, bad music. Can you believe this drivel was nominated for Song of the Year? Just having to write that made me want to throw up in my mouth. I was going to post the William Hung version - yes, it exists - but decided that was simply cruel and unusual punishment for the poor suffering readers of this blog. I want some of you to keep coming back…

Wow - my days of under-estimating what can happen in a weak, nervous market are certainly coming to a middle. I figured that after nine straight days of losses, the Nikkei would use the modest bounce in the Dow overnight as a good excuse to rip off a good 100 point gain or so today. The market did in fact open up strong, for all of 15 minutes or so - by 10am the market was down almost 100 points. By mid-afternoon we were down over 200 points. Apparently, this is the first time since 1965 that the Nikkei has lost ground 10 straight days.

The decline was pretty much across the entire market - only three of the 33 sectors were positive (Pharma, ‘Others’ and IT/Telecoms). The major bank stocks hung on to positive gains for most of the morning, but finally gave up the ghost in the afternoon, with Mizuho (8411) falling Y15,000, SMFG (8316) down Y20,000, and MUFG (8306) doing relatively well to only shave 9 points. Autos got absolutely hammered, due mainly to the 18% slide in US auto sales. Marine transport and machinery were the two big losers - Tokyo Trader Girl has been holding on to Komatsu (6301) for a while, but it’s lost over 15% over the past couple of weeks, and 8% in the past three days.

There was actually a lot of good news and bad news today. Good news, my account at Okasan Online is finally open. Bad news, my funds aren’t yet moved over (hopefully by tomorrow). Good news, a lot of the stocks I follow - Mixi (2121), DeNA (2432), Dwango (3715), and Billing Systems (3623) went up like gangbusters today. Mixi was up Y30,000 at one point, DeNA was up over Y20,000. Bad news, I only have a couple grand left in my E*Trade Japan account, so missed out on all those moves. For the SECOND DAY IN A ROW. Someone, please just shoot me. Christ, it’s days like this that makes me wonder how Japan got its reputation for being high-tech and all - the level of technology at Japan’s banks and securities companies is strictly stuck in the 70s. It shouldn’t take four days to move money electronically. One more day of missing out days like today, and I swear I’m going to lock myself in a room in the woods somewhere and become the Japanese version of the Unabomber or something.

Anyway - I tried to get some moves in smaller stocks like DaVinci (4314), Tech Firm (3625) and AxelMark (3624), but nothing really worked out. After losing six or seven trades in a row - all for about $25-30 each - I gave up; I obviously wasn’t feeling it today and without my full account at my disposal it was just depressing me to see Mixi and DeNA pull off $100 moves without me.

Looking for bad music to put up since I lost money today was equally depressing. I came up with a winner, of sorts. Stay tuned for today’s crappy music selection; I’m sure we’ll all agree it’s really, really bad.

Chart of the Day

I’ve been trading Mixi relatively steadily for weeks. I wasn’t really able to trade it the last couple of days as I was still moving my funds. In the interim, Mixi went from around Y660,000 to almost Y740,000. Yep - that’s an $800 move in two days. And I was on the sidelines for it. Excuse me while I go bang my head on the table a bit more.

Today’s stats:

Gross: -Y17,268
Net:-Y19,268
Shares: 210
# of trades: 5 (W0 L5)
Best: -
Worst: DaVinci (4314), -Y5,200
Avg R: -0.9
P/L for month: -Y1,598
Avg R for month: +0.06
Holdings: DaVinci (4314) @ Y70,000, AxelMark (3624) @ Y207,000

Edwin: $6,298, on 37,000 shares traded
Jorge: $664, on 3 contracts traded
Tokyo: $176, on 1,413 shares traded
Denarii: -$25, 3800 shares traded

The Virtual Office is back! We’re still in the midst of getting the members together; expect a mix of new and former members. Four members reporting today. Edwin, today’s big winner, is a new joiner from Denver, check out his blog at http://evolutiontrading.blogspot.com. Some of you might remember Jorge, he was poised to enter the VO a month or so ago, he’s joined now and his blog is at http://investingadventures.com. Denarii is a long-standing VO member, his blog is here.

When I went to bed last night here in Tokyo, the Dow was down over 100 points. I woke up expecting another bloodbath. Boy, was I surprised to see the day ended up positive (even if modestly so). You can make (or lose) a lot of money with that kind of volatility. Either way, I wonder what that means for the Nikkei today - we’ve had 9 straight days of losses, and I suspect the market is looking for a reason, any reason, to ramp higher with authority. The modest bounce for the day - but significant bounce from the mid-day lows - last night in NY might provide it.

VO Stats
Week: +Y7,113
Month: +Y7113

In keeping with Dino’s tradition, I’ll post good music when I make money, not-so-good music when I lose money.

This one is especially for Dino. I’m sure he’ll appreciate my selection.