Trading Funk

The past two days my positions have continued to do poorly. SRS seems destined to go to zero with me along for the ride. Yesterday I lost another 4%. Today was actually shaping up to be a success in my opinion only being down slightly even after DSX gapped down after earnings. This seems to be happening now that all my positions are not performing their roles. I would have made back some gains had it not been for DSX. Can't live in "would have, could have" land, have to accept reality that sometimes this happens but I am trying to determine why. I may need to sell all of my positions and step back for a few days and reassess. I hate to do that because all it does is put money in thinkorswim's pockets and not mine but it may be necessary.

I ended up bailing out of my /ZC short because I didn't want more risk to the downside and here it is another 40 points lower and I would have made bank...there I go again with the would have's. To make matters worse I decided to go long at 340 which is now going against me and fouling up my day. It was at a reasonable entry point but I still need to consider why I went short in the first place, because I expected a pull back in equities and they are mostly correlated at the moment.

My only winner as of late has been CHK, doing great the past 3 days, which I sold half my position ahead of earnings and wouldn't you know it goes up the next 3 days at half my size. So I decided to replace that long with the /ZC to help stay balanced but that is clearly not working either. These are the pull backs I wanted and expected and I am still losing money, even with ultra short positions and that is not right.

So why is that? Am I entering and exiting at incorrect times? I definitely feel like my timing is off and maybe I am being more emotional and not really recognizing it? I do still anticipate more of a sell off coming, we likely see some increase in unemployment that gives people a reason to sell stocks. At this point it will likely just be profit taking because there is not good enough evidence for the majority to shift themselves bearish but who knows. I want to lean short biased and slightly am but I feel like as soon as I get more short the market just reverses on me and I lose more money. Possibly a week off could be good, I could set some stops and walk away or just sell everything and sit in cash but that partially seems unnecessary with some of my longer dated options.

I would like to see a pull back in CHK and roll into some options with a higher strike price. I will be curious to see what happens because we had what I would consider to be a distribution day, where we had a very large volume day with decent movement but it finished well off it's highs after touching a resistance level of 25. I would like to get back in around 22 and go up a strike.

I may shuffle some things around before the weekend and sell some options if I feel like I can collect some premium over the weekend. If things end up poorly again tomorrow I may just set stops and shut things down for a while. It actually could be a good experiment to try where I am trading purely mechanically. All I know is I need to do something to get myself out of this funk and account slide so I don't start doing dumb things and forcing trades.

Total Return for 2009: 138%