I'm writing this blog mainly to keep  a track of my own learnings and journey as I start my pennystock trading adventure.

I'm trading from the UK and when doing so there are very few options in terms of stockbrokers to trade the US Pennystock tickers.  There is also very little information on this for UK traders starting out so the two options I found were Interactive Brokers who require a $10,000 minimum starting account (once I achieve this I will move to them) and Suretrader. Like most people I've heared a lot of bad things about Suretrader, but the fact of the matter is that for UK based traders there is a little choice and so I plumpted for them with and began my account with $650. I have to say on the whole I've been very happy with their customer service. It can take 15 minutes to get someone chatting back to you, but I've never left a chat without my queries fully answered. The webtrader tool seems very user friendly for the beginner too.

So after about 6 months of learning from Tim' videos and various sources I made my first trade yesterday. It can only be described as a beginners fumbling in something which he knows he has much to learn in. It's well and good having the science in your head, but for some reason when the bell went it all goes out the window.

I chose CDTI for my first trade. It was reaching up near 3 month highs and I thought a break out above $2.50 would see a spike. I mapped out the support levels and noted $1.96 as strong support. However 'bang' the gun went and the stock shoots up a few cents before even at 9.28am. Having read about morning spikes I thought I was missing out and hit the buy button, big mistake. As soon as I did the stock dropped from my buy of $2.32 to yes, you guessed it $1.96 where it bounced perfectly off the support level and preceded to rise for the rest of the day actually finishing at $2.34 after hours.

I held overnight, more out of curiosity than actually any strategic thought process. Today it had virtually no volume in premarket trading just over 500 shares before the bell. At the start it climbed up to $2.44 giving me a mighty $22 profit at the time. However, it dropped through support levels all the way back to $2.20 where it bounced slightly. However I had to leave work to come home, 4.30pm UK time is like 11.30am US Eastern time.

I thought I could put in a stop loss, not having ever placed a trade on a platform before I didn't realise a limit order was something completely different. I limit sold at $2.28 even though the price was at $2.33, wondering where the hell my position had gone I soon realised what I had done, stopped cursing Suretrader and acknowleged my own amateruism.

 

The most important thing I have learnt from Tim so far is there is no such thing as loss if you take away lessons from your mistakes. So, for my first trade, here are mine:

 

1) As a rank beginner don't try and buy into the morning spike, better to wait for a dip buy or for sideways action and then high of the day on volume.

2)Keep unemotional - For someone who is fairly emotional I found that I was all over the place during this trade, from the despair or going down $70 from market open to the relief of recovering to scratch by end of day one and then the disapointment that the stock cracked on day two. I found there were so many things I was trying to make sense of and which moved so quickly, all will come with time and practice. Stay unemotional, choose a buy point, choose a sell point and stick to the plane Pete!!!

3) As Tim says the vast majority of stocks follow the market, the first half of the day CTDI  followed the NASDAQ almost tick for tick, it was quite amazing. One of the reasons I held over night apart from a run up towards end of day was that during the second part of the day the stock was uptrending against the downtrend of the NASDAQ

4) I correctly didn't sell too early when I could have had a big loss, but recognised the pattern of higher lows as a bullish signal

5) I recognised that stocks can run on Fridays as this one did

6) I could physically see 'power hour' and noted how the increase in volume over the last hour of the market can greatly affect a stocks final price

7) Finally a lot of chatrooms like Stocktwits talk utter rubbish and should only be looked at to see if the stock you're interested is getting much attention, certainly don't listen to where people think the stock is going.

 

So all in all for the cost of just my commission and a $2 loss I learnt a lot that I can take into my next trade.