Not a good week at the stock market

Well, not a *horrible* week.  I didn’t lose money overall, but I was unable to stick to my goal of paying attention to stocks only once per week.

My problems began on New Year’s Eve.  As usual, I did my weekly portfolio review on a Friday night, because that’s when Schwab sends their status report.  Problem: DRR had dropped below the price I paid for it.  Both ITA and MACD said sell.  Only 2 of 16 technical indicators still thought it was a good thing to own.  So I sold it and bought OKE.  I had done a stock screen some time earlier, looking for well-regarded stocks with good MACD scores.  When I sold DRR, the score for OKE was still decent, so I bought it.  It immediately went down.  By Wednesday, ITA and MACD both said sell OKE, as did the majority of all other indicators.  How could the stock go bad so quickly?  Even worse, by Wednesday DRR had picked up again.  By Friday, all indications were that OKE should be sold, so I sold it and bought DRR again.  This is the classic "sell low, buy high" strategy that everyone knows should be avoided.  As it happened, OKE had also risen by Friday, so—purely by accident—I managed to sell it for more than I paid: a whopping $1 more, after subtracting trading costs.  But I sold DRR for 4% less than I had paid for it and then rebought it for 2% *more* than original price.  Clearly my trading program needs adjustment.

RYOCX has been flat for a while, but I couldn’t sell it easily because it’s an American mutual fund (not a stock or an ETF) and so American citizens cannot buy it if they live outside the Imperial Homeland.  (The USA has always been very isolationist about such things.)  At my New Year’s Eve review, *zero* indicators thought it was still a good investment, so on Monday I called Schwab and gave them an oral order to sell it.  There was some pushback: Schwab strongly suggested that I should keep 10 shares, because if I sold all of it then I couldn’t buy it again due to my traitorous foreign address.  So I sold 99% of it and got a tidy 25% profit.  Because I had owned the thing for nearly ten years, my annualized return was only 2.6%, which isn’t good enough to reach my goal (10%/year).

TNA has done very well over the last few months, but it’s a scary investment because it’s 3× leveraged so it can drop like a stone, which is what it did on Tuesday, losing 5% of its value in one day!  The New Year’s Eve review had been poor: only 3 of 16 indicators thought it was a good hold.  MACD didn’t like it anymore, but ITA still did (and slavishly following ITA’s orders for this ETF would have made me 170% over the last year, while slavishly following MACD would have yielded “only” 66%).  On Monday it was up, while on Tuesday it was way down, so on Wednesday I sold it—and of course it then went back up, but in the meantime I had locked in my 38% profit!  Not bad for nine weeks of doing nothing but waiting for the proper day to sell.  Thursday was flat, while on Friday TNA went down again—now even ITA thinks it should be sold, while SmallCapTimer.com is still recommending “Buy TNA”.

I bought FLIR on Dec. 20th, when all 16 indicators were favourable.  By New Year’s Eve it had dropped to 10 indicators, yet ITA and MACD were still bullish so by rights I should have been able to ignore it for another week.  But since other stuff was going screwy this week I ended up looking at FLIR every day.  Not good!  It’s been on a downward path this week.  By Thursday it had *zero* positive indicators, so I sold after only 2½ weeks of ownership, for a gain of 2%.  Today it went down some more, so I’m glad I didn’t wait.  It seems that five-billion-dollar companies like FLIR are still too small to use for week-by-week momentum trading.

JNK is doing very well.  I’ve owned it since Nov. 19th and it still has 15/16 positive indicators.  Also it pays monthly dividends with an APY of roughly 8%.  And I just got a 1.5% annual “capital-gains distribution”.  The stock price is down 1%, but with dividends and distributions my overall gain is +2% for a month and a half.  I think I’ll keep it.

KOL is up 4% since I bought it on Dec. 22nd.  (Thanks, sabotlours!)  It spent two weeks with 15/16 indicators, but it’s had a down week and so now it’s got only 7/16 positive indicators remaining (but ITA and MACD are still bullish).  Should it stay or should it go?  I have no idea!  TD also has 7 positive indicators including ITA and MACD, and I’m definitely keeping TD.  I put in an after-hours limit trade to try to sell KOL tonight for $48.25, but there were no takers.  Dividend yield is about 5%, so it only needs 5% appreciation for the year to meet my 10% goal.  Maybe I’ll keep it a bit longer.

I’m still waiting for dividends from TD and DRETF.  The payment from TD is late; their dividend was supposed to arrive yesterday.  Did they print a paper cheque and mail it to Schwab instead of using electronic transfer???