The Daily Dose of Trading Comments

Sometimes I second guess myself about a decision and move I make with respect to taking or exiting positions. One of the things I have always stressed is that you have to have a clear understanding of where you exit a position, right or wrong; most importantly when wrong. The oil shorts of last week or a case in point. The chart setups where there for the short. I even showed one in this column. That all got blown out of the water along with everything else with the Katrina story. I had physical stops in yesterday morning and almost all of them were removed at or near the opening. Looking at those prices now, we would have significant losses had we second guessed and stayed in. Did it hurt to say I was wrong? Not anymore. It used to but after writing here for 4 years, it's gotten a lot easier as I realize that I will be wrong 40+% of the time on individual positions. That's just the way it is! You have to take your losses when they occur and not care that you were wrong. It's not about right or wrong, it's about profits and losses and on the loss side you have to quickly get the heck out of the way when it happens.

The chop continues. New daily highs a little over 30 minutes ago but they are bringing them in rather hard and fast as I type. I'm only trading the indexes today other than a little add to one of the 3 gold positions I held. I'm in no hurry to establish individual stock positions at this time. The only money I've made has been in the futures so far this year and I'll probably concentrate there more and more for a while. You can do essentially the same with the ETFs if you don't want to work the futures markets. On the individual names, I am thinking more and more that I want to forget swing trades so much as to concentrate on finding two or three good names like FNX and trying to get a long term trade established ... one that I can keep for many months. I'm tired of this chop stuff. It's just not worth the effort.