My morning routine is that, usually, I’m in front of the computer at 8:00 am Central Time, 30 minutes before the US markets open. I run the scanner on PowerX Optimizer, and it finds possible trades based on my criteria, explains Markus Heitkoetter of Rockwell Trading.

My Criteria for Finding Stocks

My criteria, for starters, is I like to look for long and short signals because I like to play the markets both ways. I want to see at least a 60% return on my investment, and I also want to see stocks that have a closing price between $5 and $250. I don’t like to trade stocks that are below $5.

I want to see a profit factor that is higher than three, meaning that for every dollar that I would have lost trading the strategy, I would have made $3. I also want a risk-reward ratio of at least 2%. Usually, there are anywhere between four and eight stocks that come up on my scanner everyday.

I use three criteria to find A-plus trades, and this is where I’ll share with you what I’m looking for.

gappiness

Number one, I’m looking for gappiness. I look back to see if the stock had a lot of gaps over the past year. I like look back over the past 13 months.

trendability

Number two, I’m looking for trendability. What does trendability mean? It means that I want to see nice trends to the upside and to the downside.

P&L chart

And the last thing, number three is, I’m looking at the P&L chart. What does the P&L chart mean? The P&L chart basically shows you what would have happened if I had traded this stock according to the rules of the PowerX Strategy over the past year. Now, this is one of the strengths of the PowerX Optimizer software, and this is why I use it every single day.

So I can take a look at the trading report where I see for the past few trades, what I would have made in profits & losses.

When To Sit On Your Hands In Trading

Here is a trade I was in with Apple (AAPL) a few months back. What I want to see in the P&L chart is, I want to see that over the past year, if I had traded Apple according to the PowerX Strategy, is it nicely going up? In this case, absolutely.

Here I would have had seven winning trades and four losing trades for a total of 60%, and a 220% ROI.

When to Sit on Your Hands

When To Sit On Your Hands In Trading

At the time of this writing, I saw Everi Holdings (EVRI) on my scanner and it passed MOST of my criteria. First of all, it did pass all my scanner criteria, otherwise, it wouldn’t have come up here.

Also, it did pass two out of my three criteria in terms of gappiness and trendability. But when it came to the P&L chart, it didn’t meet my criteria.

This is where this morning I did the most difficult thing for a trader, I was sitting on my hands. You see, at the beginning of my trading career, I had this little voice in my head. This little voice said, “If you don’t trade, you don’t make any money.”

Well, after I forced some trades, I realized, if you don’t trade you also don’t lose any money. This is why it’s so important.

In the beginning when I got a new tool, or when I had a new trading strategy, I wanted to trade it. All I wanted to do was trade. However, when there’s nothing to trade, DON’T TRADE.

This is why I use the PowerX Optimizer. It does a fantastic job of keeping you out of trouble.

When To Sit On Your Hands In Trading

As you can see, this is a chart of the S&P 500 (from the time of this writing), and for a whole week, there was a lot of uncertainty.

We didn’t really have a defined downtrend overall in the markets, or a defined uptrend. We are, in fact, just diddling along. The markets are just teetering.

As you know, I am trading two strategies. In addition to trading the PowerX Strategy I’m also trading the Wheel. For the Wheel, I started looking for trades. Let me show you what I was looking for this morning.

One of the trades that I thought, ahh you know what, this might actually be a decent trade was Marriott (MAR) but when I looked, however, there wasn’t enough premium in there to sell according to the Wheel.

I looked at another stock that came up on my radar this morning, which was Penn National Gaming (PENN). There was some great premium in there, but PENN sounded rather risky. You see, for me, it is very, very important that I have a great track record.

At the beginning of my trading career, I would have forced these trades. I would have said, “Oh my gosh, I cannot be done working after one hour.” This is what happens sometimes in the morning, I sit down in front of the computer at 8:00 o’clock, half an hour before the open, and I run through the PowerX Optimizer and don’t find anything.

Now, one of the things that I do every single day is, I check my open positions, and in the PowerX Optimizer I have my watch list. So first I look for new trades, and secondly, manage my existing trades. I don’t, however, need to over-manage my account when there are days where there is nothing to trade.

What I used to do back when I was still new to trading and nothing would come up was, I would adjust my criteria. I said, yeah, you know what? Instead of getting a 60% return on my investment, why don’t I lower it to 50%, or why don’t I lower the winning percentage to 35%. Maybe lower the volume to 200,000.

I had to learn the hard way early in my career not to do this.

Summary

In summary, there will be days when you’re all excited. But you see, in order to make money with trading, two conditions have to be met.

Number one, you have to be ready, and number two, the markets have to be ready. You may be ready but if the markets are not ready, you’ve got to sit on your hands.

The beautiful thing as traders is, it’s not that today is the trading opportunity of a century. No, tomorrow there will be more trades, on Wednesday there will be more trades, on Thursday, and so on.

Every single day I’m running the scanner according to PowerX Optimizer and I will find more opportunities to trade.

So today, one of the hardest lessons is, sit on your hands.

Learn more about Markus Heitkoetter at Rockwell Trading.