Should you do what you’re supposed to do?
Welcome to all the Valentine’s Day special subscribers! Happy Valentine’s Day. Hope you’re wearing green. Oh, wait, pink. Send flowers. Give chocolates. Dinner and a movie. As an investor I like green a lot better than pink even on Valentine’s Day.
In dating, maybe. But in trading, let’s not just do what we’re supposed to, or we’ll end up average at best. Selling when the mainstream media and the rest of the market is panicking is what you’re supposed to do. You bought at the lows instead. You were supposed to bullish every time the market rallied off its Euro-crisis lows. You would have lost your shirt doing what you were supposed to be doing. And now? Like I said yesterday, looks to me like “we’re supposed to selling the top this time” because what we were apparently supposed to do by buying the tops every other time before this one was wrong, so you’re supposed to do what’s different this time.
So since you’re supposed to what you’re supposed to do and doing what you’re supposed to do is wrong, but what you’re supposed to do is different this time so are you supposed to do what you’re supposed to do?
I write all that because I got a lot of emails and comments from you new subscribers who are wanting to know if we should be buying right now or loading up or selling again, even after my opening piece about how I’m handling this market set up right now. Don’t over think things.
Read this http://tradingwithcody.com/2012/02/13/great-traders-recognize-when-a-pattern-changes/ from yesterday if you missed it. And more to the point, it doesn’t matter what you’re supposed to do with the broader markets. I’ll remind you again that finding the very best stocks in the market like Apple and Google and F5 and so many others you’ve seen us hit here is much more important than just about any “timing the market right” trades we can do over time.
I’m going to cover the last of my WFC short positioning. It’s been a wash on the short for the Revolution Investing portfolio, down about 3% since we put it on. We originally made big money when we originally put the short as our puts tripled and quadrupled as the the stock fell from nearly $30 to nearly $20, but I’ve lost some money on WFC puts as it’s rallied back.
I don’t like the ongoing settlement negotiations and attorney general/Administration rumblings of more stealth bailouts being packaged as a “settlement”. I don’t like it as a citizen of the United States. And I don’t like it as a Wells Fargo short. There’s only one of those two things that I can actually do anything about — I can cover the Wells Fargo short and step out of the way.
And finally, you’ll note I’m opening up more long exposure in the overall portfolio by virtue of reducing my short exposure by ending this WFC trade. As long-time subscribers have seen, I’ll often tweak my overall portfolio exposure as we have gotten aggressively long buying and covering puts at each of the recent Greek/EU-inspired stock market bottoms and having built up shorts and trimmed down the longs at the highs. You don’t have to just move in and out of cash and stocks and you don’t have to just buy Index calls or leveraged ETFs when you get bullish. Much more on this in coming days.
