Proceed With Pomp and Vigor

It was a pretty interesting day to be a trader.  The sellers made themselves known early by pressing their bets as my plan leaned toward.  I can’t see the market as clearly at 4:15pm as I can at 4:15am.  I don’t know, perhaps the fatigue of juggling corporate job, playing hand grenade hot potato with stocks, keeping tabs on my enterprise, and staring out the window at the salty landscape below fade my edge by afternoon.  But when I wake up and turn on the markets, they’re so clear, OLED HD clear.  You should read those AM posts, they even surprise me.

I was an early seller, cutting more losers out of my book.  I cut Citi, Facebook, and Cree.  Cree was a ten bagger.  It was a fourteen bagger last week, doesn’t matter.  Then I sashayed into SRS (ultra-short real estate ETF) on the first dip of the day and swung it trough-to-peak and sold like a boss.  It felt nice.  It felt nice booking two winners today.  You know what else felt nice?  Seeing Restoration Hardware continue to get the homo hammer to the head.  Winning while losing.  Facebook turned into tank book after I sold it too.  Hell, I’ll take it.

After all the above was said and done, I was around 60% cash.  It felt too heavy, having that much cash, so I went hunting.  One of the advantages I have being an independent trader is position sizing.  I can get in and out no problem.  One of the disadvantages, in my opinion, is I can end up having too many names in my book.  Too much to keep track of.  I was cognizant of this early this year.  My goal then was to gamble a bit, but eventually build into 5-9 core holdings.  Before yesterday I had fifteen.  So when hunting, I looked first at my existing positions, where they have gone since origination, and whether I could add.  I’ve booked two solid gains in Zynga and was sitting on a legacy position up over 30%.  Sure it could go back to its horrible 10% slasher-horror antics, but it shrugged these last two days off.  Thus I bought more.  This is however, slightly uncharacteristic of my style.  I usually wait for buyers to step in and confirm support.  That’s something I now have left unknown.  Thus the position is not full sized, but instead ¾.

Then I bought TSLA because the earnings reaction felt overdone, it’s near a risk I’m willing to wager, and there was heavy volume lifting the offer into the closing bell.