ION Geophysical (IO) was the stock du jour, doing 191,000 trades and $147MM in volume. It was hard-to-borrow and I paid the brookie 1.92 cents per share ($192 per 10,000) for the borrow. It gave me a good spot and faded all day (with one cynical stop run attempted at 11:45ish, study the Bookmap closely there). I was a very good boy and took NO partial profits (Dave Mabe’s constant badgering having a good effect),

TTPH was also in play, also hard-to-borrow ($322 per 10,000) … got a good spot but this one DID succeed in jamming me out on a cynical stop run (a redundancy), but I was wise to their ways and quickly re-shorted. I could have made quite a bit more if I had covered after hours, but it’s Thursday and I’m already pretty exhausted from sitting in front of screens all day (I’m an old man), so I said the heck with it.

Now all was not caramel popcorn and mint juleps, I also opened up IB and… you guessed it, shorted two ETB stocks that were in-play: WTRH and FSLY. As is nearly always the case, I was tricked, trapped and stopped out pretty fast in both of them. It was fine, planned loss and all that. But then… yep, right at the close, I swear ten minutes from the close, I hammered into both of them to get revenge, you know, get back those earlier losses, and I think you know what happened. Yes, more losses. Unnecessary losses. So I’m annoyed with myself.

Nevertheless the sick coin banked in the HTBs offset the stupid ETB shorts at IB, which means I wasted another day of my life (plus paying a lot of borrow fees). You have to be constantly vigilant, can’t slip up, can’t go on tilt, can’t get revenge. Gotta just let it go. Until tomorrow!