February’s results came in at 24.43% versus -0.28% for the S&P 500 — a 24.72% outperformance.

The early part of the month was the most profitable, with the market nearing free-fall at times.  But, the entire month featured above-average volatility — with only 18 of the 21 sessions exceeding 20 points in intraday range.

This fruitful environment, however, wasn’t without its challenges.  One-third of the sessions opened with a significant gap higher or lower, and 2/3 featured a reversal of trend from the previous day’s close.  In other words, scalping and day trading continued to benefit while swing trading was very tough.

Having said that, our mid-range forecast has been fairly accurate.  SPX gained over 6% by the end of the month following our long entry point on Feb 11 and, just today, reached our 1999 upside target — a total of 180 points in about three weeks.

We averaged a little over 6 position changes per session in February, with about 2/3 being profitable.  This number was inflated in the last half of the month when many typically attractive shorting opportunities were negated by CL manipulation and trades were closed at essentially no gain.  Our biggest loss on a single trade was 0.38%.

Our average monthly results since Jan 2015 increased slightly from 18.58% to 19%.

Following @pebbletrades?

I set up a private Twitter account @pebbletrades to disseminate notices of intraday position changes.  If you trade frequently, just go to the twitter page and click “follow.”  This generates a request that I can then approve.  It’s generally pretty fast unless you make the request in the midst of a busy session.

If your twitter handle bears no resemblance to your actual name, please drop me a line saying so.  This service is for subscribers only, and I’d hate to inadvertently exclude you.

Note that I will still post all intraday position changes on the website, first.  Once the post is entered, I tweet a trade alert that references the position change in some way (e.g. “target reached.”)  Hopefully, these tweets will make it less necessary to constantly refresh the web page throughout the day.