Well that sucked.......

Well the bailout plan fizzled today in Congress and didn't muster enough votes to pass. In the end I am glad because I thought it was a horrible idea to begin with. But, like with any kind of trading, I am going to try and trade off of what is profitable, not necessarily off what I would like to see happen. This is the reason that I was long 1,000 shares of FNM going into the trading day. It actually gapped up from $1.83 to $2.23 this morning which I thought was the sign of a good day to be had, but unfortunately I was very, very wrong. As soon as it was announced that Congress was voting the stock started getting a bit shaky, as I think many stocks did, and as soon as it was evident that the bill wasn't going to be passed the stock hit the floor. I was on a conference call at the time with a client and couldn't watch the stock as much as I would have liked. I set a stop limit order at $1.60, not thinking that it would get exercised but just wanting to be cautious. I'm glad that I did. I had a chance to check the stock on my PDA during the conference call and noticed that the trade had been executed that that the stock was, for the moment, hovering around $1.40. That was the lowest that I had seen it in a while so I jumped back in and purchased $1,200 shares at $1.45. The stock rattled around for the rest of the day and ended at around $1.56. I'm still out for the day but I have more shares at a lower cost, so if the stock goes where I'm hoping that it will I stand to make a decent profit. If something productive hasn't happened by Wednesday, however, then I need to get out. Hopefully tomorrow will be more promising.