End of a Crazy Christmas Week Trading

After yesterday's large market run, everything was poised to open lower today like yesterday. After the morning spike up, downward movement was coming. It was obvious that the movement was very muted today unlike past Friday's when Alphabet (GOOGL) would give up 20 to 30 points in one morning.

I decided that today I would trade options on the QQQ ETF instead of on Alphabet. I find that Alphabet's options are very expensive as are all of the FANG stocks, but this ETF moves with FANG and doesn't appear to have the premium pricing. I was very profitable with my initial trade. Unfortunately I tried to jump in on the other side too quickly without clear signals and gave back half of my profit. I also didn't have anything left for latter in the day when there was the largest movement from 3 to 4pm.

Below I have the charts for Alphabet (GOOGL), QQQ and TQQQ so you can see the similarities. I also made a quick video trading lesson on my YouTube channel.

Day After Christmas Boom

What a day! The market opened higher and most stocks retraced to Monday's lows

before taking off higher. I made a profit higher than what I lost on Monday, but failed to wait for the right time to buy and I sold around noon instead of expecting the run to last the whole day which is typical for Wednesday off of an over sold condition.

I didn't trade Alphabet (GOOGL) today, but I did use it for reference as it was one of the only stocks that did not go down to retest Monday's lows. I bought call options on Boeing, Tesla and Netflix on the way down. I was down bad by the time it changed and went higher. I ended up selling everything around 12:30 pm and missed out on the other half of the gains for the day. I made charts on each company below.

I would expect to see more upward movement on Thursday with some pull back for the second half of the day and it should give back half of today's gain. I hope I am wrong, but I will trade carefully tomorrow. Check out my market commentary below along with my favorite pick for 2019.