ZIOP, my first penny stock trade. Closed Oct 6, 2009

Here is my trade on ZIOP and let's see how this is different from Tim Sykes (I pick him as a target for comparison since his trades are published on his website, so it's possible to study and emulate. And his track record is not bad either.).

First, the time scale is very different: I stayed in this trade for 5 days. Second, the entry is not very clean: the $2.60 level has some technical significance to it but it isn't a major break-out. The $2.60 is a resistance level; this was the high level of two earlier days.

Second, a professional trader would have probably exited the trade by stop-loss on Oct 2nd; I didn't since I had very little money at risk.

The not-so-clean entry and a draw-down make this trade look amateurish and "lucky". It often happens with amateurs that speculative trades turn into long term investments... Knowing that, I chose a company which would not be bad in the long term. As you see, ZIOP did deliver a nice surprise with a positive press release yesterday. Nevertheless I believe my exit was fine as waiting for a specific press release wasn't part of the strategy.