Don’t get complacent

Good morning and welcome back to the terrordome, where you better wear plated armor.

The markets are all basically at multi-year highs. Apple and Google, our long-time two largest positions, are up huge and we’ve even juiced those gains with our strategy of buying long-dated call options in those names when they were down with the rest of the markets because of…what was it again?

Euro-crisis, right? Stocks were in a bubble, right?

The consumer is collapsing, right?

Corporate profits and margins weren’t sustainable, right?

The most important thing for us to remember right now is how awful it felt when we were buying. How stupid it felt when we’d buy Apple calls and then see the stock drop, say, another $10 bucks…from, say, $300 a share. We all feel pretty darn smart right now, don’t we? And sure, we were either smart enough or lucky enough to have made the trades we made when we made them. But when we’re thinking such things instead of trying to pat ourselves on the back, let’s reach for the sell button and trim things down.

I’ve got a lot more cash on the sidelines and am much more hedged overall than I have been in a while. Buy the panic, sell the relief/euphoria. Stick with the overall net long positioning while the corporate economy continues to boom and the bull market continues to climb the wall of worry. But don’t get complacent. Make the hardest trade.