Things I learned today. Market overview Apr 22

It was another roller coaster ride today. We had a gap down that was very quickly reversed and we pretty much marched back up into positive territory most of the day. This is the kind of thing that used to happen in a bear market, but in reverse. Remember all those gap ups that were quickly sold into and the bulls got crushed everytime they tried to put up a fight? Well same scenario here - except the bears are getting skinned. Literally.

But it was a very choppy day with lots of momentum changes. By my last count I think we had about 10 reversals on a 5 minute chart. But the bears finally showed up and took control of the final hour. Something they have not done in a long time. Good earnings continue to be sold in this market and one can feel the nervousness and lack of direction right now. AAPL's earnings came out and they beat convincingly, as did EBAY. Both stocks were up after hours. We'll see how traders react in the morning.

So, things I learned today. Let's make a list:

• Stocktwits is a phenomenal resource for some extremely sharp and talented traders. Some traders anticipated the turn and expressed their 'gut' feeling long before it happened. And you can use ST as a LEADING indicator for the market. Just follow some of these smart traders, watch their tweets and their trading calls, and you'll see for yourself.
• Never, ever go against an accurate, successful strategy/system that you follow in your trading. Today, I took my gut feeling and went against my signal. I was lucky that my trade was a low risk position and I was quickly able to reverse and go with my signal. In other words, never be afraid to bail out on a position and go in the opposite direction if it makes sense to do so.
• Always give your trades enough room. Be patient and let the trade develop. I bailed out on a trade for a small gain, only to see it take off and missed out on a BIG gain. Definitely, this is the weakest part of my game and needs improvement.
• It takes experience, knowledge and hard work to become a 'smart' trader and harness that 'intuition', 'it' thing that come to great traders. It is possible.
• The folks at eSignal support are very nice and friendly bunch. After communicating with them the last few days, someone called me today. He was polite and informed me that they found a bug in eSignal that was causing the 'hanging' of the application. He tried to see if he could do anything to improve by running a remote session on my PC, but to no avail. I will just have to wait for the beta version when it comes out.

I took several scalps of SDS today and a short of POT that was good for 50 and 65c scalps. Overall, it was a very good day, but could have been better. No complaints here.

Hope this helps. Happy trading and good luck.