Short At Your Own Risk

This rally seems to be unstoppable. The more frustrating thing is the fact that the largest moves have happened in the materials stocks I wanted to get back into. ANR could have been another FCX or more if I would have pulled the trigger. The tough thing now is a lot of longs are very far away from reference points, so you either have to be very patient and wait for a large retracement or take a long position off a smaller retracement and hope it doesn't go lower where you get stopped out then it goes up without you.

AAPL ripped higher today and took away most of the gains I had on my short call position. I was afraid this may happen but its still below the strike so I may as well wait and see what happens this week and cut it loose. The incredible thing is that it has moved over six dollars to even get back to where it was before earnings. Those market makers have it made. AMZN is still fine and will likely expire worthless. JBLU moved up nicely giving me more cushion for those to also expire worthless.

I still run into dilemmas of when to get into trades. Do I wait for the end of the day or get in intraday? I guess it depends on your viewpoint. I try to use 1 min charts to get a good entry. The averages were at 900 which is where I thought we would hold and it did hold for a long time until the close. I bought puts on IYR and DECK which both were working until they ripped higher into the close. In this instance had I waited till the end of the day I would have gotten them at much better entry points. I bought VMW calls as well, which also moved up into the close so that is an instance where it worked in my favor. It's annoying because I ended up flat on the day due to those new positions but we do have much more risk to the downside now I just got in a little early. I will have to get back out if my puts keep going against me which sucks, it's almost like always trying to buy in a bear market and getting stopped out thinking that if you go short you're goint to get whipped by a huge reversal. Oh well, I'll keep following the rules and taking risk, the good thing is I waited for good entries, apparently not the best, but good and you have to take risk for it to give a reward.

Housing was unexpectedly strong and China announced better manufacturing numbers so things do seem to be pointing to a recovery. The critical thing will be to see the S&P hold 875, which will now be the entry point I look for to get into my stocks unless they show entries ahead of time. If we hit 930 before we hit 875 I'll look to take more shorts before getting long again.

Total Return for 2009: 136%