Trade ideas for today: spend time with your family, practice drinking heavily during the day, stalk an ex on facebook, go to the library, plan a picnic in meticulous detail, learn how to whittle,  go to the mall and buy an ironic “gone fishing” sign to hang on your door, actually go fishing unironically, …and so on.

I’m sure there are tens of hundreds of thousands of pennies to be made doing lots of death-defying scalping in this market, but I’m not going to be in there. The trend is down, the fundamentals are down, rumors are flying but nothing short of dumping a couple of trillion dollars into the market in the next month is really going to reverse this. Optimistic news is just a roadmap to a plan to a framework which presumably envisions something good at some point. The markets are still choppy and sick:  a few large items of bad news can trigger another mini-crash or a full on flush, whereas any good news here has to be weighed against a bunch of structural problems no single event can really solve.

Thus, I’ve circled the wagons after a furious day of overtrading and ending up where I started but making my broker’s family rich.

I’m 90% cash,  Only trade today was to buy then  immediately sell  my weekly puts because this clearly became a fuck fest, and also sell a bunch of shit at the first rally just to get more liquid.

I’m holding my S&P  124 puts for January 2013, bought some more gamestop (GME) october 20 puts because they suck, small long position in the undervalued polish index (PLND), a small losing position in natural gas (UNG) and a small position against the Russian index (RSX) because I live out here and  business coverage is reading like something out of 1997: cautious optimism, slight pessimism, cautious optimism again, then an unforseen bloody collapse.

THQI is also doing great, keeping the penny-stock section of the portfolio honest, or if not honest at least not unprofitable.

I don’t care what happens, all of these can sit until Friday.

While I’m writing this we’ve seen totally random 60 cent swings in the S&P, followed by roars of victory from one side or the other followed by an immediate, equally meaningless reversal and further pointless cheerleading. I need some more hobbies, cause this “I day trade five days a week” is gonna harm my portfolio sooner rather than later.

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