Charts and tables

[pyesetz]

Ho hum.  Another week of obscene profits on Wall St.  I blame the Obama administration, with its Quantitative Easing and its calm, behind-the-scenes action regarding the Egyptian crisis.

The nice thing about this chart is that it creates the appearance that I know what I’m doing!  The green bars show that I have recovered my loss and now have more money than at the start of the year.  But the red line shows that I still would have been better off just parking my money in SPY.

Symbol	│	Fri		│	Mon		│	Tue		│	Wed		│	Thu		│	Fri		│	Actual
DRETF	│	8		│	6		│	6		│	6		│	5		│	5		│
SE	│	13	5	│	16	4	│	14	5	│	1		│	-3		│	0		│	5
FLIR	│	61	38	│	50	31	│	58	29	│	55	32	│	48		│	40		│	6!
ETN	│	23	1	│	12	-26	│	39	-14	│	29	-4	│	39	3	│	40	8	│
GIII	│	-58	-101	│	-26	-80	│	-19	-54	│	3	-44	│	21	-30	│	7	-23	│
ATML	│	-10	-55	│	-53	-121	│	-41	-78	│	126	-50	│	107	-38	│	96	0	│
MKL	│	-8	-44	│	11	-51	│	15	-31	│	15	-18	│	11	-10	│	18	-4	│
CAT	│			│	20	-60	│	19	-35	│	-1	-20	│	12	-17	│	53	-14	│
CVX	│			│			│	-11	-56	│	-47		│	-28		│	-28		│	-56
SPY	│			│			│	1	-38	│	-5	-31	│	-3	-20	│	7	-14	│
TNA	│			│			│			│	-62	-163	│	-14	-104	│	55	-70	│

In the table below, each day has two ‱ figures, for that day’s closing price and the next day’s stop.  Grey is for prices I didn’t get because the stock was sold.  DRETF doesn’t have stop prices.  As you run your eye along each row, note how the two numbers both increase and also get closer together.

SE: The new pSAR rule said I should have sold last Friday for 7‱.  I ended up selling on Wednesday for 5‱, which is the same amount of money spread over more days.

FLIR: What a disappointment!  Wednesday night the company reported its Q4 results.  They had missed analysts' estimated earnings by a penny.  Also they will start paying dividends, first payment later this month.  Sounds like not-bad news, right?  Wrong!  At Thursday's opening, FLIR gapped down 6%, triggering my stop.  The stock was in free-fall and no buyers were available at my stop price, so the stock-exchange computer sold my holdings for 26‱ less than my stop!  Then FLIR recovered later in the day.  There was no way I would have given FLIR a 6% stop depth, so there was no way I could have avoided getting thrown off that horse.  These things just happen sometimes, especially to companies that sell pornoscanner equipment to the US government.

ATML: On Wednesday Atmel announced its Q1 earnings guidance, which blew analysts' estimates out of the water.  Its stock rose 15% that day.  This is one of those lucky breaks where you just have to be holding the stock when the good news happens.  What a nice way to counteract the sting of FLIR!

CVX: Got thrown off another horse.  Ouch!

 

In this week’s version of the pie chart, you can hover your mouse over each pie slice to see the name of the company; click on a slice to see a price chart.  This kind of HTML construction is called a "client-side image map".  I very rarely find any use for them.  They are a bit of work to construct, so I am not promising to do this again next week.

Comments

[dakhun.livejournal.com]

I "blame" the Obama administration, with its ... calm, behind-the-scenes action regarding the Egyptian crisis.

I'd like to hear why you think this. :-P I don't think anyone over there even listened to him.

I still would have been better off just parking my money in SPY.

Or, you could have bought the Sector SPDRs for the cyclical sectors: XLY, XLE, XLF, XLI, XLB, & XLK and then you would have outperformed SPY by 1.08% YTD doing nothing more than buy-and-hold. Then, following this strategy, when you think the next bear market *might* be starting soon, (not just a dip or correction but a real bear) you start switching to the counter-cyclicals XLP, XLV, & XLU. But then if things get really bad you sell even those.

Your decision to exclude Energy and US Financials has been a handicap, as those have been the number 1 and number 3 performing US sectors YTD. What you are doing is trying to outperform an index, selecting from a universe of stocks that collectively are under-performing that index.

Also, I don't think what you are doing can correctly be called "Swing Trading" because if that is what you were doing then you would buy when stocks were at the low end of a range and then sell when they get to the high end of a range. But your actual selection criteria require that the stocks you buy already have considerable upward momentum before you buy. Meanwhile, you only tend to sell when the stocks are already falling and hit your stops. I think what you are doing could be better described as "Momentum Trading". And one thing that makes it difficult to do momentum trading right now is that it is earnings season, a time period that is news-intensive, whereas momentum trading by its speculative nature only works best in the absence of definitive news.

Normally, I don't like giving investment advice, because then I find myself having to mentally follow the ups and downs of the instruments or strategies I recommended, as well as having to follow the ups and downs of my own portfolio. I don't like doing that at all. But in this case, I think you really need some more ideas. You also need an investment thesis, something that defines what is going on in the economy or what is going on in the company who's stock you want to buy, and then you need some sort of trading strategy to exploit that worldview should it turn out to be correct (as well as what to do should that not turn out to be the case). From what I've seen so far, I'm not sure you have developed either of those disciplines yet. You seem to be accumulating a whole bunch of personal "rules" ad hoc, and that is a system that is sure to collapse under its own weight eventually.

What I see is a lot of buying and selling, but for reasons that I would not find sufficient for me to confidently buy or sell any of those stocks at any of those times. For example, when you bought TD, you said something about buying it for the dividends, a long-term argument... but if you did get those dividends they would never be enough to get the 10% annual gains that you said you needed. Then you sold the stock on a tiny dip. Now the stock appears to be literally at an all-time high. I would not have bought the stock in the first place if I had your goals, but then having bought it, I would not have sold it on random noise.

Also, I'd be more cautious about using sell stops, because of what happened during The Flash Crash. It could happen again, and indeed I think the odds are better than 50/50 that something like that will happen the next time there is a real market correction. With the amount of time you obviously spend on this, there is no reason you'd need sell stops to notice if one of your stocks was down.

[pyesetz]

Thanks for writing!  But my reply is too large for the margins of this page, so I have written it elsewhere