I’m in a funk. You ever get to that place where you want to reverse every one of your trade ideas? I’m there now.
I sell GRMN at $81 and it goes to $103. I buy BBBY for some reason at $36 and it goes low. Then I watch it bounce, set a stop loss that gets hit at $34.74, and watch it have a nice up day today. I sell EBAY in a whipsaw too, and now it’s jumping up like I thought it was going to two week ago.
I think the main mistake here is I’m being conservative, trying to avoid losses. GRMN looks like it’s dropping, sell… EBAY is dropping, sell. The other part of it is that I was nearly fully invested when the stocks started tumbling a couple weeks ago. So “reinforcing” my position was a trick out of my disposal. (That’s my own fault.) I aslo was pretty frustrated for getting in BBBY early and just wanted to get some distance from that trade.
So what do you guys do when you make big costly blunders like this?
I’m trying to have a little perspective. I made a big hit on GRMN, played it pretty well to the strategy I set up. Everyone long was losing money last couple weeks, so I was keeping pace, right? (sidenote: I wonder why I was so impressed by the relative strength of EBAY and GRMN when stocks were going down, but then didn’t back that up when stocks start to rebound a little. e.g. GRMN is down 2% when the market is down 3%. I kept thinking “I’m losing less money than everyone else.” But didn’t think to translate that into “When things turn around, these guys are going to soar.”)
I’m also trying to find a really great setup… something to get my confidence back. I’ve always wanted to own some GOOG for the long term since I think information is going to be the most important comodity out there in 10-15 years and GOOG is on top of it. It looks like GOOG might be at a good spot for investors late to that game to get involved.
EBAY broke through a major resistance level and is taking off. If I watch it closely, I might be able to get in close to trend. It’s moved a lot past couple days so it’s hard to pile on now (especially after selling it at just about the absolute bottom). But then some stocks don’t really pull back = GRMN.
Trading opportunities in SIRI and ESLR, stocks I like to watch. But I’m wondering if I’m on top of those enough to trade them well. Any other ideas out there. (Need to look back through some old comments where people made suggestions before.)
Thanks for listening. Have fun. And I hope others doing a bit better here.