FInally a good short play that was well executed.  It seems that I have been finding good setups lately but my execution has been poor.  Most of my research has to do with reading blogs/chat room/newsletters, etc... Kind of keeping my ear to the ground.  Basically I go over all the watchlists and find the plays that look most appealing to me based on my relatively green knowledge of fundamentals/technicals/sentiment.  Most of my picks turned out correct (and it's hard to call them my picks because I'm just filtering information that is given to me), but my timing/entries/exits turned out bad.

Anyway, I think part of the reason this play turned out well is that there were only 178 shares to short and I put down 100.  I keep putting big money into big plays and then jump out when the go slightly wrong, or in a few isolated but highly unprofitable cases (not tracked on covestor) horribly wrong.  I gave myself a huge margin of safety, putting my stop up at breakout levels (15.57).  The other thing is that the stock just looked weak.  It had a little bump, possibly a squeeze and failed to breakout past the previous level.  Pretty illiquid stock (65K avg volume) that looks like it was just being propped up by an insider (Harold Simmons) as a last ditch effort to save the stock price.  I think it's going to fail because the fundamentals look horrendous (I am not an expert value investor but this scathing article is instructive.

So i'm going to hold this short to at least 10 or so although 8 is tempting, keep my stop loss in place, and hope for a good confidence boost in stock picking.