Песец

Lawyers:  So, lawsuit ^#1 finally paid out over Labour Day weekend, only 6½ years after my Aunt 𝑨_₁ died of neglect at a nursing home.  My sister and I got more than the statutory maximum award, even though I never signed a power of attorney for anyone!  But it does seem that I’ll have to hire one of those creatures to run the other 𝑨_₁–related lawsuits ^#2, ^#3, and ^#4 (if all of them are actually needed).

Financial status:  This award has decimated my HELOC personal debt.  I now have lots of available credit — but still very little income to repay it with.  The Social Security Administration still hasn’t decided whether they will start paying me next year; I was waiting for them to send me a list of requested documents when the Canada Post strike happened.

HVAC:  My gas-fired electrically-operated home furnace was 25 years old and becoming worrisome, so the family decided to spend some lawsuit credit on replacing it (my kids will be paying the HELOC interest until Social Security starts).  We had been talking to an installer a year ago about replacing the furnace with a heat pump using various government grants and loans, but couldn’t quite work things out.  So we went back to the same installer and told them we can now self-fund.  On December 10ᵗʰ, we got a new Napoleon® heat pump and backup gas furnace.  That was ten days ago; the heat pump still isn’t working, so for now we’re getting by with the replacement furnace (while paying interest on the heat pump).

Ecobee:  I was once offered a job at Ecobee, which I declined.  Two years ago, I got a free Ecobee thermostat for my house through a grant program from my utility company.
      We don’t like it.  It insists on being connected to the Internet twice a year, just to deal with Daylight Savings Time (hopefully President Trump can put a stop to that), and then it takes advantage of the opportunity to download replacement firmware which makes the user interface less functional.  It seems to be a spy in my house that is not working for me and I would like to get rid of it.
      The HVAC upgrade went fine until connecting the new system to the existing Ecobee, whose connection display screen (so fancy!) showed all wires OK except the 𝙾/𝙱 wire was not connected.  That wire is used only for a heat pump, which we didn’t have before.  The installer blamed either the Ecobee or the house wiring and said he could replace them with a Wi-Fi model for $350.
      I do not want my HVAC signals going over radio waves.  That’s needlessly high-tech.  I do not want to spend $350 to replace a device I got for nothing.  They are supposed to have 3-year warranties, but the grant program offers only one year.  Other sources say a replacement Ecobee can be had for $180, but I don’t even want another one.

Honeywell:  I checked the websites of area hardware stores and it seemed that a Honeywell thermostat was the cheapest replacement that would work for a heat pump backed by a furnace.  I contacted Napoleon and they claimed “any heat pump thermostat” would do, such as the Honeywell.  I bought one on December 13ᵗʰ and installed it.  Things did not go well.
      I had to call Honeywell customer support (at night on Friday the ⅩⅢ) to find out why the config option for the 𝙾/𝙱 wire did not appear.  I didn’t know whether I would need it, but its invisibility was concerning.  It turned out that I had selected the wrong pair of “I have a heat pump” and “I have a gas furnace” options — with the correct settings, the config option for reversing the meaning of the 𝙾/𝙱 wire then appears.
      That allowed the heat pump to run, but it provided air that was initially tepid then after an hour it was cold.  I tried invoking the “reverse the 𝙾/𝙱 wire” config option — that made the air positively frigid!  I tried “EM heat” mode, which is documented as bypassing the heat pump and activating only the furnace.  That worked for an hour, then it went back to the ineffective heat pump while still displaying the “EM heat” mode on the Honeywell display.  This is crazy!
      The Honeywell thermostat was unable to regulate the temperature of the house, so I was forced to reinstall the Ecobee before I could go to bed.  Unimpressive!  And the expensive heat pump still wasn’t working, now with two different thermostats.

The Slough of Despond:  The house was warm, so I didn’t have to do anything over the weekend about the fact that I (or my children) were paying by the day to own a heat pump that wasn’t helping at all to reduce our heating cost.  I like excuses for not doing anything!  Over the last few years, I have become quite used to the idea that interest charges just keep racking up day after endless day while I continue to not do anything about my problems.
      On Monday I avoided thinking about next steps, which seemed to involve testing the 6-wire thermostat cable between basement and living room for continuity and isolation.  How could I possibly do that?  I need an ohmmeter at the furnace and a secondary wire to run down the stairs from the thermostat.  Where can I find that much wire?  Eventually I thought of the 100-meter extension cord for my lawn mower, which should be plenty long enough.  Its 120V rating is overspec for this 24V application so I’ll probably need interfaces at both ends.
      On Tuesday I again spent the day avoiding my problem.  Eventually I came up with the connector shown at right.  It’s based on a 2-wire grounding adapter (which some people think is too dangerous and shouldn’t be sold anymore), a piece of wire, a bolt, a nut, and a clip.  I will connect the clip to one of the thermostat wires and then send the signal downstairs using the ground wire of the extension cord.
      On Wednesday I had a work shift, which provided the perfect excuse to put things off until dark.  Of course, it then took many trips up and down the stairs to get the jerry-rig working.  120V contacts tend to get coated with oxides and sulfides, so it doesn’t work to just shove an ohmmeter probe into the 120V socket — you need an official 120V connector to scrape the coating.  I used the cord from a laptop power brick.  There is a total of 33 Ω of resistance through one thermostat wire (up to the living room) and one lawnmower ground wire (back down to the basement).
      I was eventually able to determine that all six wires in the cable are just fine.  They pass through from end to end and are not connected to each other internally.  Good news!  I do not need to run a new thermostat cable nor switch to a radio connection.  Next thing to do is get the installer to come back and look at the heat pump.
      On Thursday I continued to avoid my problems.
      On Friday I called the installer.  He refuses to come back and tells me to reinstall the Honeywell and give the air pump more time.  It could blow cold air for up to 10 minutes during a defrost cycle!  He has nothing to say about EM mode.  I’m thinking I may have to file a warranty complaint with Napoleon.

More news later!

Lawyers:  Nothing.

Stock market:  Nothing.  Still waiting for Rome to start burning.

House: Recently I saw a mouse in my basement, for the first time in years.  Usually my basement gets shrews.  Shrews are smaller but have venom glands while mice don’t, so shrews generally win territory-fights with mice.  Most shrew species don’t climb, so the shrews stay on my basement floor while the mice prefer my kitchen.

Here is the route that I saw the mouse take.  It entered the house next to the laundry exhaust duct, travelled along the top of the stone foundation (which is mortared to a 45° angle to make it hard to walk on).  The varmint then scampered down to the window-blind roller that has no blind at the moment, then jumped up to the next segment of foundation, then entered the interior wallspace next to the kitchen sink’s drainpipe.

They say you should put the mousetrap where you see the mouse, but there are no level spots along this track!  So I put the trap where I usually do, on the floor, baited with chocolate as usual.  I caught a shrew!  I haven’t been having a problem with them recently.  They’ve been staying out of sight, eating my basement invertebrates.  It’s too bad that I killed one needlessly.  There was no way the animal I caught, with its black fur and (in death) legs perpendicular to its body, could possibly have been the animal I saw scampering along the foundation, which on one of its trips noticed that I was staring at it and instantly reversed direction.  (Shrews have poor vision and it takes them several seconds to realize that I am looking at them and I am a gigantic predator, so they are now in big trouble.  Mice respond in an instant.)

So I tried again.  This time I put the trap in the basement walkout room, just under the laundry exhaust duct, baited with peanut butter.  I caught a mouse!  It seems smaller than the mouse I originally saw, but this dead-mouse-in-a-trap near the entrance might well be enough to scare off the rest of its family from living in my house.

( Readers with sensitive stomachs might want to skip this part )

Next question: what attracted the mouse’s attention?  I don’t think they’ve come in this way before.  The answer was obvious: there was a bag of garbage in the walkout that I’d been keeping there for several weeks.  You see, my regional government limits me to 3 bags of garbage every two weeks and sometimes I have 4 bags followed by several weeks of 3 bags so I can never get rid of that fourth bag!  And this happened to me just *after* their “double-garbage weeks” for Christmas and New Year’s.  So, um, yeah, there was a mouse-hole chewed into the bottom of the bag.

I have successfully used the walkout before as a garbage-storage area (especially in winter), but clearly it is risky.  I was already aware that the external door of the walkout (which is at least 80 years old and in poor shape) does not do a good job of keeping out rain and snow — or bumblebees — and now mice.  I suppose I could try one of those tags-for-extra-bags that they gave me when this collection régime began, but I haven’t been using them because when the free ones run out, I’m supposed to buy more.

I have a spare garbage barrel with lid that I’ve been keeping on my rear deck.  Barrels with lids get destroyed when put out on garbage day, but they are more suitable for these extended retentions.  So I moved the bag-with-mousehole to the barrel and now my walkout is garbage-free!

Relevant prior posts:

• 2008 Aug 23: Dead-shrew photos.  First-ever comment from frith!
• 2014 May 11: Mentions the shrew breeding area next to the basement walkout.  Nobody has called me a werewolf in years.

(Subject line is from a furry fairy tale.)

So I was yerfing recently with sabotlours (whom I actually met once in meatspace) about my new Neurolens® brand eyeglasses and it occurred to me that they are something I could show on this blog that isn’t a stock chart.

A variety of prescriptions are simultaneously ground into these lenses.  I have myopia, and astigmatism, and exophoria, and cranial-nerve weakness.  This photo doesn’t really do justice to just how weird it is to look through these glasses (when not wearing them) and seeing how wavy everything is.

I am raising my bet to 180% short.  While the market heaves up and down, I keep short-selling at roughly the same price.  Hey look, it’s a series of lower highs — what more of an excuse do you want?  And we didn’t bounce off the upper lime-green line, which is bearish.

Doesn’t this chart just paint a picture of “choppy seas”?

On Oct 08 I wrote, “I plan to wait 4 days (until Tuesday) and then start using the EMA(10) as a daily trailing stop.  If price is already above that on Tuesday that I’ll cancel this trade with another loss.  Shit happens.”  Well, shit happened but I didn’t cancel the trade.  Serves me right for posting while a trade-set is in progress.  Anyway, I looked in on the market today and saw that it was down -2.2%, so I decided (seat of the pants) to augment my short by another 20%.  So now I’ll gain 1.2% for every 1% the market drops — boo yah!  I don’t have a BUY-stop at the moment; not sure yet when I’m going to end this trade, which is currently sitting at an expected loss of -2.3% (if I closed tomorrow at today’s dotted-blue-line price) after dipping as low as -3.8% yesterday.  I could walk away right now with a loss of only -0.5%.

Banks, banks, banks!  Oh, and Hamas-vs-Israel.  And don’t forget Putin’s war in Ukraine.  Oil, always oil.  It’s a never-ending hailstorm of reasons for the stock market to go down, down, down, into the ground, to get out of the rain.

From here:

What flag has three red stripes on a yellow field?
⇒ The flag you are describing with three red stripes on a yellow field is the flag of Spain. However, please note that your user profile mentions that you are in Canada, so …

When was the three-red-stripes flag used in Vietnam?
⇒ The flag of Vietnam with three red stripes on a yellow field has a historical significance. This flag was used by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, also known as North Vietnam, from 1945 to 1976. After the reunification of North and South Vietnam in 1976, it became the national flag of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, which is the official name of Vietnam today.

* * *

I was led to this den of error from this article on the decline and fall of the USA, which contains a photo with this flag in it from the Jan 6 insurrection.  That led me to this Quora article, which contains a quote from ChatGPT:

What are the yellow flags with three red stripes? When do people use them?
⇒ The yellow flags with three red stripes are the national flag of Ukraine. They are used on official buildings, at official events, and by Ukrainian citizens to show their patriotism and support for the country.

But when I tried that pair of questions myself with ChatGPT, it told me that these flags are “typically associated with maritime signaling and represent the letter 'N' in the International Code of Signals.”  (The maritime signalling flag for 'N' is actually a blue checkerboard.)

After 2 months of silence, my blog shall speak again!

Latest trade was not so hot.  The market took too long to get going with its downswing, so I didn’t have enough buying power left when we got to the bottom, so I only got +0.9% for all that time and risk (the maximum drawdown was -9.1% on Aug 25).  Still, I managed to walk out of the casino with a profit even though the cards did not break my way.

From Jul 11 until Aug 03 there was an upswing that I could have traded for a +1.7% gain, but I skipped it because of that green line. One of these days I have to review the data supporting that line — it seems to skip too many good trades.  But the red line came very close on Aug 25, and I have somewhat more faith in that line, so I think I’ll skip the contrarian trade on the next downswing.  Meanwhile, we’re going up, so I should start short-selling tomorrow.

2022 Comparison

Start	+/-	IWM	TNA/TZA
Jan 05	🐻	+0.34%	+0.30%
Jan 07	🐂	–1.89%	–2.69%
Feb 10	🐻	+1.78%	+1.90%
Feb 22	🐂	+1.47%	+1.53%
Mar 02	🐻	+0.39%	+0.87%
Mar 08	🐂	+0.75%	+1.17%
Mar 17	🐻	+2.34%	+5.84%
Apr 06	🐂	+3.03%	+3.09%
Apr 21	🐂	–8.29%	–10.78%
Apr 21	🐻	—	+0.38%
May 27	🐻	+5.71%	+5.14%
Jun 13	🐂	+6.92%	+7.20%
Jun 30	🐂	+1.27%	+1.35%
Jul 08	🐻	+0.39%	+0.40%
Jul 14	🐂	+0.78%	+0.41%
Jul 19	🐻	–3.49%	–5.53%
Aug 22	🐂	+5.84%	+6.25%
Oct 04	🐻	+1.04%	+1.11%
Oct 14	🐻	+5.96%	+7.27%
Nov 09	🐂	+0.37%	—
Dec 05	🐂	+2.77%	+3.04%
Dec 15	🐂	+4.23%	+4.17%
TOTAL		31.71%	32.42%

On Jun 25 I wrote, “I also don’t account for interest on cash balances (over 4½% now at IB!), margin interest (7½%), nor the fee for borrowing shares (¼% per day, so 62½% annualized)…  a short trade that drags on for a month would yield significantly less than my charts are showing.  Perhaps some improvement in simulation accuracy is warranted.”  Years ago, I used to trade TNA and TZA in an IRA account, instead of doing IWM in a margin account as shown here.  Those tickers are basically pre-packaged short-selling/trading on margin, with insurance against losing more than 100%.  Everyone says those fees and insurance are very expensive and surely it would be better to borrow from your own broker?  If I had used TNA for the trade-set that ended today, the profit would have been only +0.5%, not +0.9%.

Let’s review the trading for 2022, comparing the use of IWM (🐂 long on margin, 🐻 short borrowed shares) vs. TNA (3× 🐂) or TZA (3× 🐻) for each trade-set.  So instead of betting 300% of my money on IWM, I would bet 100% on TNA.

Bottom line up front: it’s a wash.  Using TNA/TZA (with prepackaged fees) gives roughly the same results as using IWM and imagining that there won’t be any fees.  So it seems that, if I ever try this with real money again, I should either use TNA/TZA or demand that my broker beat their effective cost.

The two approaches mostly trade on the same days, but TNA/TZA trades more often because the ±0.75⋆ATR prices that I look for come up more often on these leveraged investments, perhaps because they are preferred by irrational gamblers who are too willing to trade at prices that are far from true value.  These extra hits add more heft to some of my trade-sets, so they gain more vs. the IWM versions.

For simplicity, I think I will continue to show IWM trades here until the end of the year, but with confidence that equivalent results to these paper-trades could realistically be obtained, by using TNA/TZA in a retirement account.

I’ve been watching that dashed orange line since Mar 10 and yammering about it since Jun 02.  We didn’t bounce off it again this time, but maybe we’ll come back to it next month.  If so, that will create a 4-month-wide head-and-shoulders pattern.

On Jun 29 I wrote, “For my next trick, I will predict a double-top: price will hit $189.24 around Jul 5 or so.  I will not be betting on this prediction.”  See solid green line. It actually got back to $188.84 on Jul 03.  That’s 0.2% lower than I predicted, which is not good enough!  Good thing I didn’t bet on it.
      Speaking of double-tops, look at that beautiful dotted-turquoise line! Nearly a year later and the same price recurred to within a penny — that’s an error of just 50 ppm! — but only the dividend-adjusted IWM chart shows this 50-week double-top, which would be a very bearish sign if other stock funds agreed.

Lawyers: they’re back!  Still with nothing to say about the deposition, but apparently they’ve managed to make contact with my sister in Israel.

I didn’t take this short trade and I didn’t get the +6.5% gain shown here, not even in my imaginary hobby game spreadsheet.  Back on Jun 02, I wrote “The green line got pierced today, so the market is rising rapidly and I should not bet against it with a SELL-SHORT order.”  Well, the green line scares me off many trades that actually would have been perfectly profitable; there are some occasional very nasty ones that it saves me from.  The line is just a guess as to what might count as “rising too fast”, based on the formula MIN(22)+4*ATR(22).  I used to use 6*ATR in this formula, same as for the red line, but that didn’t trigger soon enough and I wasn’t saved — so I pulled the replacement coefficient 4 out of my butt.  Remember, folks, you’re watching 🐔 🪛 ⚾ (The Crank Channel)

On Jun 22, price got down to only 6¢ (that’s 0.036%) above my blue line without actually touching it.  I debated calling that ‘close enough’ and then beginning the long trade on Jun 23, but I didn’t.  We’ll see if my next imaginary stock-purchase happens tomorrow.  Short-selling remains off the table, due to the recent piercing of the green line, even though that overlay has failed me here yet again.

On Jun 07 there was a dividend issued of nearly 51¢ per share.  I don’t normally show dividend payments on these charts, nor do I account for them in my spreadsheet.  Back when I used Interactive Brokers paper trading, I treated their imaginary dividend payments as random events that gave me undeserved extra money, due to long positions I happened to have been holding weeks earlier.  I don’t recall ever having to pay dividends, even though that is supposed to happen if you are short coming into ex-dividend day.  I also don’t account for interest on cash balances (over 4½% now at IB!), margin interest (7½%), nor the fee for borrowing shares (¼% per day, so 62½% annualized); all of these were around 0% for many years but have become significant again since the last time I did any real-money trading.

I wasn’t aware, until just now when I looked it up, just how gigantic the borrowed-shares fee is.  That makes my simulation quite unrealistic.  The margin rate seems reasonable to enable going beyond 100% long for a week or two, but the borrowed-shares fee means a short trade that drags on for a month would yield significantly less than my charts are showing.  Perhaps some improvement in simulation accuracy is warranted.

Another +0.6% win in my imaginary hobby game!

Last time I said that this swing would last for “several weeks” and the market would drop by “oh let’s say 4%”.  Well, the swing is now over after one week and the market is up over 4%.  Remember, folks, you’re watching 🐔 🪛 ⚾ (The Crank Channel).  I managed to make a profit, yet again, by ignoring my own predictions and just trading the algorithm.

Of course, the big news last night was the US debt ceiling, a nearly-fake political battle where it seems the Republicans always win and the Democrats can never manage to explain the actual rules of the game.  So now the stock market is getting a “relief rally” after the resolution of the cliff-hanger in our debt ceiling soap opera.  This rally probably won’t last long, maybe three days.  But my algorithm does not require me to predict how long it will last.

Worst thing for the bears would be if the market stays up for a couple of days, then kisses the dashed orange line from the topside, then heads upwards into the stratosphere.  Ow!  We could be looking at a June blow-off top to begin our summer.  (The orange line is the gap from when Silicon Valley Bank had its liquidity crisis.  We stayed below that line for nearly three months.  If we quickly go back down then I expect we’ll stay below it until fall.)

What trade orders for Monday?  The green line got pierced today, so the market is rising rapidly and I should not bet against it with a SELL-SHORT order.  On the other paw, the market is so high right now that if it gets down to the lower blue line as soon as Monday or Tuesday that would be a crash-signal, so I shouldn’t bet against that with a BUY order.  So, no orders for Monday!

Why yes, there were several things I could have done about the inheritance nightmare during the time I wasted on this post.  But I wasn’t going to do them!

p.s.: Average wage was unchanged as expected, and unemployment was a little worse than expected, but 75% more jobs were added than had been expected.  This was irrelevant compared to the debt ceiling.

The only thing worse than stock-talk is lawyer-talk.

The 27+-year saga of 𝑀𝑎𝑠𝑠. 𝐵𝑎𝑟 𝑚𝑒𝑚𝑏𝑒𝑟𝑠 vs. my family continues.  (Note the use here of Unicode “math italic” characters in order to emphasize the evil kitten-eating reptilian overlords from outer space aspect of the attorneys of Massachusetts.)

In was back in 1996 that we found out that my aunt A₁’s inheritance from her aunt A₂ had been stolen by a lawyer.  For 20 years after that she could never escape from him.  Try as she might, hiring attorney after attorney to go fight with him, in the end he would always win because that’s just how the judicial process works.  It seemed to me that her lawyers weren’t really working for her so much as for the Mass. Bar, trying to maximize the billable hours collected by all its members while never quite obtaining her freedom for her.  A Mass. Bar member may charge a trust for his billable hours in defending himself against claims that he is mischarging that trust!  For a normal person, donor-trust money can only be spent on charity — but a lawyer can spend it on their own ‘work’.

The wrongful-death lawsuit continues.  The plaintiff attorney (who assures me that he is 𝓷𝓸𝓽 𝓶𝔂 𝓵𝓪𝔀𝔂𝓮𝓻 even though my sister and I are the named beneficiaries of his work) was happy to receive my compendium of emails between A₁ and Wifey, which he seems to think do actually prove (like I’ve been saying for 5½ years) that Wifey was A₁’s favourite relative and should have been appointed as her Personal Representative and should be the one to decide how her condo money gets split up, assuming that the ‘charity’ whose lawyers grabbed that money can ever be convinced to let go of it.

Ho hum.  Playing the stock market is so much easier than dealing with lawyers.  I won again!  Another +1.5%.  Took only three weeks, unlike this endless lawyer-saga.  Although the lawyers would surely say that the saga would go faster if I would just hire one of their members — but A₁’s experience suggests otherwise.

On Apr 25 I said, regarding the price of IWM, that “This week I expect that we’ll be continuing downward…”  But actually prices have stayed about the same ever since.  My lovely trading algorithm, with its two arbitrary lines-in-the-sand drawn in blue, has sucked profit out of these directionless fluctuations in the stock market!  If only there was any way to extract money from lawyers, such as the one who set up A₁’s perverse estate plan, which really didn’t combine well with the wrongfulness of her death.  Um, if your client orders you to “break every law you can get away with,” could this perhaps be a sign that your client is daft?  It’s illegal to notarize documents for crazy people, but laws don’t apply to lawyers.

On this chart there are four occasions (shown in orange) where price got within 0.1% of my LIMIT without triggering a trade.  I used to attend a furry bowl-meet where the people would exclaim, “we was robbed!” whenever a bowling ball decided to ignore the laws of physics and go snaking between the pins without hitting anything — or maybe that was just the cartoon animation on the TV screen.  But “ignoring the law” is certainly an observed behaviour among lawyers, such as the law against uttering death threats in a courtroom full of witnesses.  And false documents cannot be interpreted as ‘jokes’ after being notarized, especially documents purporting to divert the proceeds from a real-estate sale, about which Massachusetts has a specific law on its books saying that lawyers in particular may not do that.  But it seems the lawyer who did that is the one signing the budget-increases for this lawsuit, so I shouldn’t hate on her too much.

Isn’t it great that I haven’t said anything about the stock market in 16 weeks?  Well, dear reader, you sort of knew that wouldn’t last, right?

On Jan 03, when last we spoke of this, I had just realized a 4.2% gain in my imaginary hobby game.  Then I said, “we’ll take a long or a short position, whatever the market offers.”  So I started short-selling on Jan 06.  That did not go well.  On Jan 12 we hit the green line, which is just an arbitrary line-in-the-sand but still.  Then prices briefly fell, then returned to the green line again so in disgust I stopped trading at 180% short, hoping the market would calm itself down — but it didn’t.  On Jan 26 we reached new highs during what I had imagined to be a downtrend.   My rules say that’s when I should close the position at a loss.  But I didn’t.

February was unpleasant.  The market was against me and all I could do was wait, while sitting on a large short position.  As of Feb 02, I was looking at a 15% unrealized loss.  But at least the newsfeed was bearish, so maybe this will turn around.   Meanwhile, my 5-year-old “the Mob stole my inheritance” nightmare continues, with some deposition practice sessions during February.  Any day I have to talk to a lawyer is a bad day.  And that deposition still hasn’t happened.  And my hobby just wasn’t helping that month.

On Feb 21 we returned to the price-area of Jan 26 yet still I didn’t exit.  In fact, I started to feel cheeky.  The news of imminent bank failures was getting louder.  Maybe I should short some more?  So I went to 220% short on Mar 03.  Then the stock market fell for six days straight.  It was glorious!  I was gaining 2.2% for every 1% the market fell.  Mar 09, 10, and 13 were my most enjoyable days of the year so far.  What a fun game this is!  If only my inheritance were so easy.

While the blue rail-to-rail move during Mar 03–07 wasn’t *quite* strident enough to trigger my ski-slope rule, the banking news was very bearish at that time so I decided to activate ski-slope mode anyway, where I don’t give a LIMIT order at the lower blue line but instead wait 4 days and then start using the dotted blue EMA(10) line as a daily STOP price.  This often works quite well during these sudden downdrafts and would have been expected to get me out on Mar 27 with a +12.9% gain, except there was sharp updraft on Mar 21 so the STOP order triggered early and I ended up with only +9.5% gain for this 9-week swing.  Oh well.

So what happened here?  I didn’t follow my own rules, yet somehow got a profit anyway.  How did I do that?  Experience.  I’ve been trying to trade IWM since 2010.  Imagine a stupid rabbit pressing buttons at random on his trading computer.  After 13 years, his button-presses start producing profits even though he still has no idea what he is doing.  My trade went bad, but I managed to get out with a profit anyway.  That didn’t used to happen 10 years ago.  I have no idea how to teach that to others.  This whole trade seemed like a continuous fumble.

Had I followed my own rules, I would have sold on Jan 26 for a extra –4.7% loss, then for Feb 09‥Mar 03 I would have had another swing for an extra +2.4% gain, then I would have needed to realize on Mar 08 that the market was cracking and I needed to go 100% short immediately, which (if I did it) would have netted me only +5.1% on Mar 21.  So really I was better off doing it my fumbly way, which was the only way I could have found myself 200% short at the start of that downswing.

The final swing in this period began Mar 30.  Four days of shorting, then I decided not to close at the lower rail in case this was another ski-slope, but it wasn’t.  Then we just didn’t hit the lower rail for the next two days, then it’s back up for more short-selling.  Apr 19–24 were boring no-trade days, then the position closed Apr 25 with yet another +4.3% gain.  This week I expect that we’ll be continuing downward and I’ll be buying long positions on the way down, which I expect to sell at a profit during the next upturn.  Stock-trading is so easy, except when it isn’t!