Dinosaur Trader is a stock trader. He writes about the daytrading lifestyle, parenthood, marriagehood and the often combustible mixture of the three. He created the stock blogosphere in 2007.
After my long day yesterday, I announced to my wife that I would be sleeping in a separate room.
“It’s hard enough to trade,” I told her. “To trade while sleep deprived is madness.”
She responded to this announcement by calling me a “little bitch.”
Sigh.
Anyway, I slept well, and woke before the rest of the family. I head down into the kitchen to make a cup of tea. This time of year, I typically see some ants. Maybe 10-20 a day. This morning, however, there were like 15 right there on the countertop. I slaughtered them and opened the dishwasher to get a mug.
The inside of the dishwasher was black with ants. I shut the door immediately, and started it.
“Thank God I got down here before Judy,” I thought.
I turned around to open the cabinet where the tea sleeps. There were 5 more ants running down the wall.
Smack! Smack! Smack! Smack! Smack!
I could feel the thorax juice shooting out between my fingers as I squashed them. Shit was getting bloody. There were dead and dying ants and ant parts, all over the place. I continued to slaughter ants for the next 35 minutes. I started following them. Ants were coming out from by the dishwasher and trying to pull the dead bodies away.
I silently took notice of their heroism before slapping them dead.
What I discovered, was that between my downstairs toilet and the dishwasher, there exists an “ant superhighway.”
Ants would meet up on this superhighway, sit up on their hind legs, and like, twirl each other’s antenae. I assumed they were somehow communicating information about where the food was, or something. Not sure if they’re able to communicate, “Some huge fucking giant is slaughtering our entire family” but that’s what was happening.
Anyway, after the flow of ants ceased, I got back upstairs to trade.
I’ve been sorta obsessed with copper lately. There’s been something very nice about just watching the same thing each day. You know I liked $4.21, and so today I noticed that it opened and was basing above there, right around the pivot, at $421.93. It was choppy, moving a half point up, and then back down. But it had relative strength early versus the market, and so I wanted to pick some up on a chop down near the pivot and hope to get out on the ramp away from pivot.
A scalp, if you will.
My first scalp was unsuccessful. At around 10am, I bought $4.2210 and only 4 minutes later had to swallow a half point loss. But it bounced like a spring over $4.21 and ripped over $4.22. Now, of course I was a little pissed off about my first loss, but I didn’t get emotional and chase. I knew it was in this chop phase, and so I calmly bid at $4.22 to pick it up again. My bid was hit at 10:21 and HG never looked back.
Yes, I caught the dead low of the move. About time I got lucky.
Now the question was how long to hold. This thing has been so weak lately, I really wanted to just bail, but decent volume came in which gave me some confidence. R1 was up over $4.26 which seemed very far away. Instead, I placed a sell limit up at $4.25 and prayed.
I’ll admit that between 10:30 and 10:40 I said some godless things. I didn’t love the wicky candles but it was holding the emas on a 3 min chart. Anyway, the wicks freaked me out sufficiently to bail during the next spike up. So I didn’t quite get my $4.25 limit, but $4.2470 was enough for me to feel good about the trade.
Judy was just waking up at this point. I went downstairs to tell her about the trade. She was still groggy. It was like slow motion when she reached for the dishwasher handle…
But it was too late. There was a big black ball of carpenter ants sitting on the floor of the dishwasher.
They were dead, but impeccably clean.
