I made some mistakes early on today. Call it lack of sleep. Call it ego. Call it “Martha”, for all I care–it sucked! But, I finished the day strong and made some money! That’s all that matters.
And check out the news clip from that fateful Monday in 1987 over on Howard’s Blog. That was neat to see, since I was 10 years old and completely uninterested when it actually happened. They sure took it calmly!
At some point in that coverage, they point out that the TRIN was at 6.44, as if it’s just another piece of data. To contrast that, I remember during the mini-correction we had in late Feb 2007, I had CNBC on. There was a reporter on the floor of one of the exchanges pointing out that the TRIN was close to 2 as if it were a major problem!
I just traded the morning today… my stocks look dead so I’m taking the day off. Two trades today, both wins, in The Williams Companies Inc (NYSE: WMB) and Activision Inc. (Nasdaq: ATVI).
You know, I think a lot of people discount my style because it’s based on lots of small winners. I know it’s more glamorous to make big 5R, multiple-point winners. But, there is no free lunch, and you have to take on more risk for a chance at more reward. This is why scalpers tend to have very high win rates, and trend followers tend to have pretty low win rates. I’m just not willing to take 3 losses to catch the eventual bigger win. I’d rather have 4 small wins. :-) To put it another way, I’m more interested in a statistical guarantee of monthly profits than I am in a bigger career payoff. My electricity bill has to be paid every month, after all!
[Edit: I came back to watch the last hour of the day, and only made one trade in all that carnage. So, a total of 3 trades for 3 wins today. I got transfixed by TSRA... it really really looked like it wanted to run back up and recover. But, it just didn't have the strength, and I wasted most of my time watching it. However, I did take a small scalp on ATVI short, which I thought had excellent chances of falling straight down. It didn't, though, and I covered for 7 cents profit (3.5 times my risk of 2 cents, but I only used a very small position size... this will pay for my dinner tonight if I go out). A least I felt like I participated in the selloff some!]
