Yes losing is annoying and really does suck. $6000 is enough to lose. You probably need to cut your losses quicker like me. My two main losses recently have been because I've sat in stocks too long and haven't cut my losses quicker. These were CRR and BBOZ. So I'm just cutting out a lot quicker from now on and minimizing the losses. For example BBOZ I bought on the 19th of May for $4.30 and i had 53000 shares. If I had of cut my losses at the close that day and sold for $4.27 I would have only lost $1590. Instead I held on lick an idiot thinking the market was going to keep dropping and BBOZ was going to go up but it didn't happen. Ended up selling for $3.98 on the 30th of May and lost nearly $16960. So lost an extra $15370 thinking I could outsmart the market. That equals dumb $hit. Did the same with CRR before that and lost a fair bit too. It won't happen again. Next time I'm out much earlier for much less losses and much more capital saved.
As for my goals for profits. No they're not smallish. I want to try and make as much as possible out of a trade. Let your winners run as they say. There are different types of trades on here though. Some are strictly day trades and others (the ones I like the most) are ones that keep going up for a few days in a row. If they keep going up you might as well try and stay in them as long as possible to maximise your profits but I know that a lot of the time I sell too early so that's another thing I need to fix up. But when it comes to buying them how I decide whether to buy a decent amount or only a small parcel is I look at the market depth and see if there is enough support on the levels below the purchase price and that there is no spread. For example CLG today when I saw it around 41/41.5c had very little support. Maybe enough to have bought 10000 or 20000 shares and their was a spread on it as the bids were fluctuating on it so I decided not to touch it. This is it's market depth after the market closed tonight which kind of backs up how it was when I was watching it although it wasn't quiet that bad will trading...
So look at the spread from 45 to 48c and no support on 45.5, 46. 46.5, 47 and 47.5c. If I had of been in it and saw that at the close I would definitely have been out because who knows what it will do tomorrow. Granted some bids might have been cancelled after market but it is still too thin to me.
On the other hand for example ones like AZL for example (I'm not saying buy it or anything but just using the depth for example if it was going up)...
It's got heaps of support on multiple levels and no spread which I think is much safer when you want to get out because you've got plenty to sell into. So for ones like that I might buy 500000 shares and lower priced ones maybe 1 or 2 million shares, It just depends on the depth for me when I decide the amount of shares I'm going to buy.
Anyway that's how I decide how many I'll buy most of the time. Hopefully it helps you a bit.
Other people might do it differently. if you do maybe tell@Phoenixx how you do it to help out
