My Failed Rally

It looks like we're still heading lower. It looked good in the morning but mid day, coincidentally (or maybe as V would say, only the mere illusion of coincidence) when Bernanke came on CNBC and the FOMC minute were about to come out we started making lower highs down trend again. In fact, we even took out the lows made on Monday. I'm going to continue to look for confirmations in the price action and volume. The short ban ends on midnight Wednesday so Thursday should be very interesting. With the financial shorts back in play... there's just no point in trying to play the long side right now. I hope to see that bottom confirmation sometime within the next 5-10 days. If this doesn't hold up... next stop: Dows 8800 or 7700ish range.

I got short some shares at the close but I didn't get the ideal price that I wanted and I panicked. I covered for a bigger loss than I'd like. I really wasn't thinking clearly at that point with everything going on at the close. It was stupid really. I should've at least just hedge it with something. I had absolutely no idea how we might open the next day at that moment... so I just took the loss. Now that seeing Asian getting beat up I'm pretty sure I could've made a least a couple thousand dollars right at the open tomorrow. I still finished up the day, quite significantly. Sometimes I feel as if I want to lose money. You might think: that's crazy! Why would you want to lose money? It's actually quite common. It's a psychological thing. Some traders do very well and go on a streak but a part of them don't believe they deserve this money. It's like a form of cognitive dissonance and they adjust by subconsciously taking some losses.

My parents are back in Austin again. The suspcious Jason believe he makes a lot more money when his parents are out of the 512 area code and doesn't like Wednesday. Just so happens tomorrow is Wednesday as well. Whoopi! Let's just be careful and not let this get to my head.

I'm trying to think of some fundamental plays again. With oil and other commodity prices down sharply, I was thinking of longing stuff like airlines, transport, and food companies. Unfortunately if we do have a global slowdown that's going to take the transport stocks down with it. Airlines... we'll see. It's hard to get on board (no pun intended) with such a crappy industry but once we've bottomed out this might be the first group that I look to.