Image Source: Pixabay

When I was a lad, my favorite times with my father were in the garden. He had planted a bunch of vegetables in the back yard, and I took a lot of pushing the plow around, planting the seeds, setting up the sprinklers, and watching things grow. The least-favorite task, of course, was weeding, but it was an important part of taking care of a garden.

I’d like to share a couple of thoughts about how I think this plays into trading, or at least my own style of trading. Let’s take a look at this daily chart of one of my positions over the past couple of weeks:

This is precisely the kind of “slow burn” I like to see. I’m not into day trading, or 0DTE, or mayhem like we saw last Monday when some kind of shocking news sends markets blasting in one direction or another. Yes, that even means I don’t like crashes. Given a choice, I’d much rather see a market slowly work its way lower in fits and starts, hopefully over the course of many weeks.

So, the “weeding” I do consists of going through my stocks each morning, one by one, and updating the stop-loss orders. This is a way of simultaneously locking in profits, managing risk, and maintaining my sanity. I would also state that my Gold and Platinum members on Slope have full access to all my positions (by way of the shared “xx-Tim-Shorts” watch list, which has 30 components right now. And, yes, I went judiciously through all 30 of them this morning, updating the stops based on the latest market data. It’s pretty disturbing how much I enjoy this task.

For those of you who can see my charts, even though I don’t show my actual stop-loss order, you can be 99% certain that whatever the next higher horizontal line I’ve drawn is my stop loss, or at least about a nickel above that level. I must say, I really am enjoying the market these days, because I can simply weed my garden and not worry about getting buried in manure.

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