As I’m typing this (Monday evening), I have 78 short positions and just 2 longs (GDX and GLD). I am certainly not positioned for any kind of bounce. However, a bounce is precisely what “should” happen, since the measured moves have either been fulfilled or have come awfully close to doing so.
Slope of Hope Blog Posts
Slope initially began as a blog, so this is where most of the website’s content resides. Here we have tens of thousands of posts dating back over a decade. These are listed in reverse chronological order. Click on any category icon below to see posts tagged with that particular subject, or click on a word in the category cloud on the right side of the screen for more specific choices.
In Tim We Trust
I’m literally just off the slopes (the ski slopes, not this Slope), but I’ve got to get this off my chest right now. First, let me show you the chart that tears me to ribbons:
Just Two More Days
As I wrote on Christmas Eve, my plan was to ride out the last four trading days of the year without any positions. It’s been pretty agonizing, because I am dying to get very aggressively positioned, and in spite of the market’s surge lately, a lot of my best short picks are falling to pieces. All the same, I am gritting my teeth and counting the hours until this year is over. Just two days to go.
The Dow Composite is still tracing out a series of lower highs.
Fit and Starts
Well, another Christmas has come and gone, and ours went off without a hitch. I get apprehensive about hosting big family meals, particularly with four dogs galavanting around, but both meals went off beautifully and the dogs all got along. Nevertheless, it’s good to see it in the rear-view mirror, since it’s a lot of work. (I’d also like to thank those among you thoughtful enough to click the Donate button on Slope to send me some Christmas thank-you cash; much appreciated!)
As for being “apprehensive”, what I’m feeling about the final four trading days of this year dwarfs any concern I had about putting on a holiday meal, because I’m consumed with a What Have I Done??? sentiment. As I’ve mentioned, I covered everything, and I mean everything on Christmas Eve, just to “lock in” my profit for 2016 without any risk of surprises (especially those central banker ones seared into my soul, like the one from Halloween of 2014). While going through my charts later that day, I really started to question whether cowardice was a better choice than bravado.
Embracing FOMO
Over the past couple of weeks, I have been “thinking out loud” about what to do with my portfolio before the close of the year here on Slope. I’ve been making a transition from my old broker to my new one, which has been going relatively smoothly, although there’s been a fair amount of learning and tweaking involved to my infrastructure. I lightened up substantially, as I said I would, before Yellen, but I started getting back in after that.
This Monday morning, an Internet outage threw my routine into a whirl, and I decided on the spot to swiftly cover all my remaining positions (15 of them remaining, down from 100) in my old account, which I hadn’t really planned to do. Since they were all shorts, and since Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday were all big “up” days, I got lucky!
