Hey guys, sorry I was out on a mini vacation. I usually take them after quarterly filings. You know, those dreaded deadlines you have to make every April, July, October and January. I was up to my neck in paperwork, and I now have many enemies at the post office. Anyway, I didn’t really go far to take a break… just down to the other side of the island. We cruised on the North Shore, and later spent a few nights at Ihilani hotel- I highly recommend staying there if you’re going to come to Hawaii. There was some special deal too, so why not. Here’s a picture I took at Waimea over the weekend. I took this with a cheap camera, but I was surprised how it came out. I love the silhouette style shots because it hides all the ugly people and it lets you concentrate on the activity more than the person.
If it’s too small you can click the pic I think.
Well, here’s my trades for July. As you can see, it was all about timing the retracements on sectors, knowing when to scale out and probably what a lot of people take for granted: knowing what NOT to short, or when to exit a dead trade. It really was tricky to short the tape in July, and I made it known that if you’re not used to shorting then it’s probably better to stay out. However, looking back at my trades, my best ones were shorts. Just check out my YGE +52%, PCX +26%, and DRYS +19% shorts. I did a brute force attack on energy calling a reversal and I hit it. This boosted me up about 13% which is good enough for me to take most of August off. Notice however, taking profits in them was very important, I mean these bad boys staged an impressive re-reversal to the upside. Wow this market is tough!
So yeah, I took profits left and right, so that means right now what is left of my portfolio looks bad. I’m just holding on to some loser shorts but I’ll just scale out of them. The good thing is that most of these are new (within the last week) and I was entering in at 1/2 positions. The market just didn’t feel right. Remember all my “feelings-posts”? Yeah, sometimes when you’re trained instincts give you bad vibes, it’s probably good to trade lightly. I wish I held back a little more, but whatever, it’s all part of the game.
I’m still on red-alert with the longs side, meaning I will not get aggressive long with the VIX this low, and volume acting strange on the major indices. Don’t get me wrong, I really like a lot of specialty sectors out there that are having nice earnings and positive guidance. I remain a fan of coffee (CBOU, GMCR), discount-retail (ROST, DLTR), medical (AMED, CMED), and some Chinese ipos (CYOU). These continue to be great buy-the-dip candidates especially on high volume sell-offs. Well, it’s August so I’ll continue to trade light. As you can see I’ve been keeping my closed swing-trades to under 10/month which is really small because the sectors I’m concentrating on can get volatile, and again, the market is difficult, especially for bears. I’ll be using the next few days to go over some of these trades so you can see why and how I came through with the trade. I usually do this for myself, but if you can take something from it then good for you.
2 Losers:
MELI 30.43 ( -9% short at 27.90. Failed attempt at smelly meli short. )
APOL 66.85 ( -1.7% short at 65.71. Failed attempt at education short )
8 Winners:
Sold NCTY 8.44 ( +17.06% short at 9.88. Rational for short China. )
Sold JASO 4.60 ( +4.50% bought at 4.40. Rational for long JASO. Hedge against solar shorts. )
Sold PALM 15.23 ( +4.10% bought at 14.63. Rational for buying PALM. Predicting bounce. )
Sold ANCI 4.15 ( +14.64% bought at 3.62. Rational for healthcare rebound and breakout.)
Covered PCX 5.09 +26% short at 6.44 ( for PCX-short rational click here )
Covered YGE 10.14 +52.85% short at 15.50 (for YGE-short rational click here)
Sold FRG ( +5.7% long at 3.48 )
Covered DRYS 5.78 ( +19% short at 6.88)
Previous Month (JUNE):
Winners:
SOL @ 6.23 (+17.60% short at 7.30)
LINC 19.47 ( +14.86% bought at 16.95)
SFLY 13.20 ( +6.67%, short at 14.08 )
CMED 20.86 (+4.7% short at 21.85 )
AMED 31.20 ( +4.7% bought at 29.81 )
CBOU 5.66 ( +.000001% bought at 5.64)
Losers: n/a
Cheers!
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