I believe Bella said it best yesterday in his post “Don’t start your vacation before your vacation”. AIG was a party all day long. Talk about crazy opportunity on this hot summer day. I want to highlight a few trading levels from today that will be important for tomorrow.

First let me just say the following: For the first time in like a year I didn’t trade the Open today. I have been working extensively on the new reading the tape training manual and I am just getting around to doing the videos. I finished all the written content – finally – and created a few videos in the office yesterday. After replaying them I found that there was too much noise (trader talk) in the background and so I decided to skip the Open and focus on the videos from home. WHAT A RIP!

So I got up early, got a quick work out in and got cracking on the videos. I was so focused on the task at hand that I didn’t even bother to open my trading platform – I knew I would just start trading otherwise. Around 10:50am I got a text message from a young trader (thanks dude) at our firm asking if I was crushing AIG. I knew immediately what that meant. I figured worst case scenario it was trading around 30 and I could catch the momentum to the low 30s. NOOOOOO…I checked on my Crackberry and the sucker had ran to 35 without me. I was fuming. But then again I remembered that the day didn’t end until 4pm. I had 5 hours to party with AIG.

As soon as LightSpeed loaded up I paid for 200 shares to get me to focus on the tape rather than contemplating how much PnL I had left on the table by not trading the Open. I gotta tell you, there is nothing like floating on a position without a clue as to what is going on to get you to figure out the important levels real quick. I call that paying for information…the forced way.

Mind you I had not loaded up the charts at this point. All I knew from the text message and CNBC on my Crackberry was that the stock went straight up for 5 points. But from watching the stock for 5 minutes I knew that the stock couldn’t trade below 34.20 or hold above 34.45. It finally held below 34.2 and I whacked the bids with fury. Within a minute the stock was down 80 cents, that was a chop. Later I noticed 33.85 held the offer unusually so I started a core short (stock cracked hard from 34.20 and now I had a seller below that level) and it was go time!

By 12:30pm I had managed to grind dual Gs on a couple hundred thousand shares and I was just getting started. The stock was still In Play so I kept at it. 33.15 big level drops and I whacked the bids once again with passion. Another 80 cent move in a couple of minutes – chop again!.

3 hours later I was still trading the crap out of the stock. No charts, just going by the box…I guess this reading the tape stuff does work huh :). I had a good day though I know I left a lot of money out on the table by not being at my desk early this morning. But you know what? This stock is going to be in play again tomorrow and possibly even Monday. So who cares I didn’t make an extra 4k today.

So for tomorrow, keep an eye on the following levels: $31 (s), 31.40 (S), 33.15 (r) and 34.20 (R). You may want to consider moving that vacation until the last few days in August. The party is on!

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