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Damir's Trading Journal
- Thread starter damir00
- Start date
See guys what I mean with round numbers, yesterday I went long at 9400 dec contr. exit 9430 (well, left a lot on the table..).
Today long at 9350 and reversed at 9400 , now this is perfect, and doesn't happen everytime, but round numbers are always good for at least a scalp ( Today Damir took big part of his longs right there 9350 area).
Obviously they are not walls, I'd say they work as rubber bands, and usually a steep rise and hit produces a steep pullback and vice versa.
Not Bragging , just I Hope this help you guys , this thread is great.
Today long at 9350 and reversed at 9400 , now this is perfect, and doesn't happen everytime, but round numbers are always good for at least a scalp ( Today Damir took big part of his longs right there 9350 area).
Obviously they are not walls, I'd say they work as rubber bands, and usually a steep rise and hit produces a steep pullback and vice versa.
Not Bragging , just I Hope this help you guys , this thread is great.
Be careful of margin, I am one of those idiots who made a bundle with margin and buy and hold in the bubble. Unfortunately I brain washed myself into thinking it would come back and so lost a fortune which i doubt i will ever see again. The comeback trail seems much longer and trecherous.
tao: I did worse than you! I had three types of things that made me rich in the bubble: buy and hold, trading stocks and trading leaps on what I considered solid companies. The first two things were on margin and the options, of course, were not. I didn't provide a safety net of any kind, put everything I had into the market and I believed the market would come back. So when stocks and options went down a lot I held for the comeback and when the margin calls started coming in, I used my excellent credit to borrow big money from credit card companies, developing debt for the first time in my life. The debt became astronomical before they decided I'd had enough credit, and I eventually had to sell stocks to cover the margin calls, but sold at much lower prices than if I hadn't borrowed money to cover the margin calls for such a long time. I sold LOW! And the leaps all expired worthless, because the bear lasted for three years -- they were in a separate account and I just held onto them till they were worthless. So, I ended up with no money, just large debt. Now I have rebuilt a reasonable sum, eliminated debt, but I have nothing like what I had or what I need.
Margin is only part of the problem. The rest lies in several things. One, Damir speaks of: recognizing you can be wrong and planning accordingly. I'm sure I'm not alone in having thought by March of 2000 that I was a genius at the stock market. Of course, I wasn't and am not even remotely a genius at the stock market. You have to realize that things can go against you and you need to develop exit criteria of some kind. Believe it or not, I still don't have a clear handle on that, after all this time. In some ways I think I'm still too wounded to deal with it properly.
I have a first cousin. We don't ordinarily speak, but she called when I was visiting my mother, during the bear market. I never thought she was all that bright, but she had stop losses on every one of her stocks and she came out of the bear market just fine. We still don't speak, but I no longer think she's not that bright. lol She preserved her fortune and I did not.
I'm coming back, through the market, because I'm the most stubborn person I know, and I didn't have a choice. I actually tried to get a job, but wouldn't you know it? At the time the stock market wiped me out, it also wiped out a lot of the rest of the people, and they just weren't hiring. I'm making more money in the market than I would have in a job, but that wasn't true for three whole years, and it has been rough. I feel like the generation that lived through the depression now.
If I'd sold everything on March 12, 2000 and gone short, I could have (almost) duked it out with Billy Gates (well, not that rich, but rich!). lol Now I'm scratching to rebuild. And, I believe now that I will do it.
Hey! Happy Birthday tomorrow! I hope it's a great day and herald's a terrific year.
Margin is only part of the problem. The rest lies in several things. One, Damir speaks of: recognizing you can be wrong and planning accordingly. I'm sure I'm not alone in having thought by March of 2000 that I was a genius at the stock market. Of course, I wasn't and am not even remotely a genius at the stock market. You have to realize that things can go against you and you need to develop exit criteria of some kind. Believe it or not, I still don't have a clear handle on that, after all this time. In some ways I think I'm still too wounded to deal with it properly.
I have a first cousin. We don't ordinarily speak, but she called when I was visiting my mother, during the bear market. I never thought she was all that bright, but she had stop losses on every one of her stocks and she came out of the bear market just fine. We still don't speak, but I no longer think she's not that bright. lol She preserved her fortune and I did not.
I'm coming back, through the market, because I'm the most stubborn person I know, and I didn't have a choice. I actually tried to get a job, but wouldn't you know it? At the time the stock market wiped me out, it also wiped out a lot of the rest of the people, and they just weren't hiring. I'm making more money in the market than I would have in a job, but that wasn't true for three whole years, and it has been rough. I feel like the generation that lived through the depression now.
If I'd sold everything on March 12, 2000 and gone short, I could have (almost) duked it out with Billy Gates (well, not that rich, but rich!). lol Now I'm scratching to rebuild. And, I believe now that I will do it.
Hey! Happy Birthday tomorrow! I hope it's a great day and herald's a terrific year.
Quote from taodr:
Be careful of margin, I am one of those idiots who made a bundle with margin and buy and hold in the bubble. Unfortunately I brain washed myself into thinking it would come back and so lost a fortune which i doubt i will ever see again. The comeback trail seems much longer and trecherous.
While we're at it, a close friend who bounced ideas off me and visa versa , lost over 5 million. totally wiped because of margin and the belief it would bouce back. He cannot believe I am still at it and am treading uphill. Now I am more of a trader but I still believe one cannot make BIG money without holding for a longer timeframe. One of the mistakes we both had , the bulk of positions was in Brokerage accounts where NO SHORTING WAS ALLOWED. So One kind of started making big mistakes instead of just selling out. I sat one day, the first of the month and in a mental conversation with myself said I should sell because I was nervous of the market. But here and I never forget this persuaded myself if I sold out now I'd pay 50% in taxes and i can't do that. So instead I paid out 98% to nobody.
What happened to your friend who lost his whole fortune? Does he have a good job? The problem for me was finding a good job; I wasn't trying to find just any job.
I never heard of brokerages that don't let you short. All my brokerages let me short. I just couldn't believe that it would continue to be that bad. I kept thinking it would turn up again. Just blind stupidity, really.
I never made decisions about taking profits based on taxes and no one recommends one do that. But you're certainly not alone in that people do it and then lose much more. By the time you were thinking of that, though, you'd have had losses to offset those profits, yes? I suppose I have enough losses to offset my gains for almost ever! But I won't even think about taxes -- I'm just trying to rebuild as fast as I can.
It's commonly thought that Buy and Hold is the best way to build. I actually don't believe that, though I don't think it's a bad way and I do it for a part of my portfolio.
My mother was keen on the stock market and I was trading as far back as in High School. She was so angry at me that I thought she'd have a heart attack when I told her partly about what a mess I'd made of things. I can still hear her screaming at me. But the sad thing is that by the time she died she herself was almost wiped out, because she believed in holding good stocks and she died near the end of the bear market -- they'd all lost so much of their value. Bingo. She also had become relatively infirm and completely lost her vision due to a variety of eye diseases, and didn't have the sense to sell out before she lost the ability to follow her stocks and make the proper decisions about them. In the end, she wasn't more responsible about it than I was. There are a lot of ways to lose your fortune in a bear market, but there also are a lot of ways to preserve it, and that's what I (we) need to figure out. I've rebuilt enough to be worried about losing it.
I never heard of brokerages that don't let you short. All my brokerages let me short. I just couldn't believe that it would continue to be that bad. I kept thinking it would turn up again. Just blind stupidity, really.
I never made decisions about taking profits based on taxes and no one recommends one do that. But you're certainly not alone in that people do it and then lose much more. By the time you were thinking of that, though, you'd have had losses to offset those profits, yes? I suppose I have enough losses to offset my gains for almost ever! But I won't even think about taxes -- I'm just trying to rebuild as fast as I can.
It's commonly thought that Buy and Hold is the best way to build. I actually don't believe that, though I don't think it's a bad way and I do it for a part of my portfolio.
My mother was keen on the stock market and I was trading as far back as in High School. She was so angry at me that I thought she'd have a heart attack when I told her partly about what a mess I'd made of things. I can still hear her screaming at me. But the sad thing is that by the time she died she herself was almost wiped out, because she believed in holding good stocks and she died near the end of the bear market -- they'd all lost so much of their value. Bingo. She also had become relatively infirm and completely lost her vision due to a variety of eye diseases, and didn't have the sense to sell out before she lost the ability to follow her stocks and make the proper decisions about them. In the end, she wasn't more responsible about it than I was. There are a lot of ways to lose your fortune in a bear market, but there also are a lot of ways to preserve it, and that's what I (we) need to figure out. I've rebuilt enough to be worried about losing it.
Quote from taodr:
While we're at it, a close friend who bounced ideas off me and visa versa , lost over 5 million. totally wiped because of margin and the belief it would bouce back. He cannot believe I am still at it and am treading uphill. Now I am more of a trader but I still believe one cannot make BIG money without holding for a longer timeframe. One of the mistakes we both had , the bulk of positions was in Brokerage accounts where NO SHORTING WAS ALLOWED. So One kind of started making big mistakes instead of just selling out. I sat one day, the first of the month and in a mental conversation with myself said I should sell because I was nervous of the market. But here and I never forget this persuaded myself if I sold out now I'd pay 50% in taxes and i can't do that. So instead I paid out 98% to nobody.