How To Make Back Your Gas Money While Trading At Work

Today I made 4% of my investment and two weeks of travel costs. The best part is, I made the trade while sitting at work, devoting less than 10 minutes of attention to the whole thing. Perhaps this post will help you enjoy similar easy profits.

Find a niche

For my current job, I have to wake up early. Really fucking early. There is however one benefit to waking up four and half hours before the market opens: I'm awake before many other traders. This may seem inconsequential and on many days it is. But the thing to understand is that it presents me with trade opportunities that fewer traders are aware of. The fewer traders, the slower the market reacts to news. This last fact can allow you to make some easy profits.

The lesson here can be extended to other areas too if you're creative enough. You might try trading at other time periods when there are fewer traders (e.g. lunch hour on the East coast, after-hours trading). A word of warning though, fewer traders also means that price action may not reflect overall market sentiment so trading outside of regular trading hours can also be risky!

The example

Between the hours of 4 and 5 a.m. of this morning, two different and very positive articles were released on Seeking Alpha in regards to VRNG. I was alerted to this stock by Tim's chatroom members. Another option for finding such a play would be to run pre-market scans that search for high volume along with a higher stock price (or high dollar volume).

As I have said in previous posts, hype can be a powerful force even when all of the facts may not check out. For this reason, I knew that I wanted to buy and hold for a short time-frame. The following picture shows the pre-market action that I bought in to and quickly sold.

As you can see, I bought just as volume started to pick up, and the bid began to get stacked. This indicated to me that other traders were getting excited about the news and the price would rise. I also bought not long after a substantial pull-back from pre-market highs which told me that this stock had good potential to rise. Furthermore, the price had broken out from it's historical highs, all pointing towards a strong buy.

7 minutes later I sold for a 20 cent gain. Had a held just a few minutes later, I would have made even more but I couldn't have known and I don't really regret it. Plays like this are all about looking for speed and low risk. Considering that I was actually at work during all this, it wouldn't be fair to my coworkers to devote my entire attention to the stock. Thus, regardless of how positive the price action may have seemed at the time, I was happy to take and quick gains. Furthermore, as you can see from the price-action following the open, too much patience would have cost me big.

The lesson here is to use your particular circumstances to your advantage. In this case, I was able to get into a play ahead of the crowd. I also minimized risk by choosing my entry carefully, thoughtfully and strategically. To further minimize risk, and to keep my job, I executed and closed the trade quickly. I hope that others might be able to draw from this and make some more easy money of their own.