$ Silver $

Just rememebr, with your "solid holds" "time horizons" etc etc, that metals go down a lot faster than up, and in the past, stay down pretty long.

Use trailing stops or puts for protection.
 
point taken tomcole. got stops in the mkt and cbot redundancy accross 3 brokers, comex and tocom via one of them. i'm still reeling a bit from the speed of the silver selloff, 2 weeks up, 1.5 hrs down. maybe i should check myself for some sort of attraction to pain. i only post so much detail on et cuz it functions slightly like a mirror in uncertain territory and what i'm getting from you and acronym is that i should figure out less ambiguous conditions for a hold
 
Avid-- I dont mean to make you feel bad, please dont.

Silver is just like NG, thin, whippy and can move for no reason. I've seen too many folks think they have ahuge P&L and wake up to see it gone and not coming back.

I dont think its that hard to make money trading, its so much harder holding on to profits. I can tell you endless stories, in various markets where I got greedy and gave back more than I rationally should have.

I hate to see others make the same mistake.
 
thanks for helping/sharing and it's totally cool. i know what you mean and it's a whole new psychological dimension, coming from 3yrs of highly regular profit taking and drawdowns on fully systematic er2.

imo the attraction to the metals is the analog between the last 2 years and 1979-80, but like you're indicating from your experience, i'm also finding it really hard to define exits in an asset that can potentially quintuple in months.

what to do

i'm increasingly attracted to defining them systematically, though none of the silver or gold systems i've currently got beat buy and hold, only match it with slightly less pain. lol
 
hi ivan ... perhaps the "move" in silver you refer to

was priced into the market (?)

silver a few weeks ago was trading over $14.50
 
I'd be interested to hear all your comments on Tom Butler's silver commentary. He's a raging bull and I always thought he was far too one-sided. However, the more I look into silver the more I think he may be onto something i.e. in terms of demand and supply. I think he's a little loony to continually harp on about the commercial shorts conspiracy....

http://www.butlerresearch.com/archive_free.html

He reckons China is the large commercial short and we all know how they got burned shorting copper recently....
 
I climbed back into silver on thursday as momentum had turned back up and trend is still sharply up. I can't imagine why anyone would rationally want to short the ETF (now trading) at this point in time....?

I guess now I'm hoping that some trader in China somewhere spills the beans about shorting the market and everyone puts the squeeze on..... Then again, hope never made me any money in the past. :)
 
Quote from Avid_Consumer:

i had quite a ride in silver like any other newcommer over the last three weeks. i picked up a personally aggressive position of 4 zi's around 12.3, rode it up to the top, and was on the phone with my buddy congratulating each other last wed like a bit of a jackass.

being new to metals and physicals in general, i didn't have the foresight to piece together successive margin increases with the ~15 post 1980 heavy resistance level and take profit on any of it. my plan for the trade (as with gold over the last 2 months which ended up significantly better but also a slap from the highs) was to try and catch the severe runup with huge wiggle room and a willingness to possibly end up flat wrong from a decent price. breakeven at worst case.

by the time thurs mornings margin induced 17% gutting was half over, it was nearly back to my entry so quickly that i simply hadn't considered the emotional wreckage of giving back a record profit in spite of my deliberate intent to try for a windfall or nothing at all on this particular trade. i literally guarded it 17 hours a day for 2-3 weeks, and ended up closing it a hair under breakeven and it hurt badly to give it back

with a few days perspective on this unusual deviation from my normally fully systematic trading, i see a clearer way to proceed into either 13 or 10 levels. i'm going to take advantage of the flexibility in the yi contracts, and build it much more slowly with less emphasis on any single entry than the zi's can afford. i'm thinking i'll allow myself to add no more than one a week as it likely plunges further, and see if we can do this again, hopefully with an avg price between 9-12 and slowly up from there

how about silver $150 an ounce in three years.. anyone..

the only thing that bothers me more than giving back that gain, is having that ugly spike staring at me from my p&l sheet for the next x months. real ugly
More...

Anyone who has tried overnight trading is familiar with the experience you just went through. The good news is that eventually you learn to anticipte the possibility of these kind of moves. Check my prior posts on silver during the runup above $8.00 a couple of years back. The blowoff and reversal was very similar to this recent one.

What should bother you is not that you lost a lot of profit, but that you had a meaningful position on when you didn't understand the behaviour of the market. A key rule of trading is that whenever you are surprised by market action, and aren't sure what the heck is going on, there is only one rational position to have - flat. Having meaningful market exposure when you don't know what is happening is no different from gambling on the flip of a coin.

As for your long-term view on silver. If you think silver is going to $150, then just buy it now and hold the bugger. It is absurd to risk 138 big handles to try and save 1 or 2 on your entry price. Really if we are in a multi-year secular commodity move, then this recent correction will eventually just be a minor blip on the chart. Check out the corrections in silver during the 1970s - there were loads of 20 and 30% pullbacks. If you had panicked and sold out during each of them , you would have had no chance at all of holding on while the commodity went up 20 fold in a few years.
 
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