Monday's Trades

Starting with yesterday, things have been wild. I began trading currency at 2pm PST on Sunday. Within the first hour I was up 40% on my investment (my starting investment was $25, so I gained $10). I got a little too confident and leveraged my position much too high. These people let me trade $400 for each $1 I invest. Amazing. Of course, there is a mechanism in place to prevent a poor sap from losing more money than he or she has in his or her account. I overleveraged and got a margin call which killed all my positions and took my gains and added about $5 in losses. After that, I kept trying too hard to make the money back. At least, I learned a little about margin calls.

In the stock market I sold all my positions in the morning. Got out of the SPY (@ 95) position that I had been holding for several weeks, as well as my SOL (@ 7.86) position (saved myself half of the losses by averaging down on Friday). GS looked like it was going into the shitter early on, so I got out at 77.36 with a small profit. Got out of MSFT (@ 21.76) with a small gain, and FXP (@ 67) with a decent loss, but limited given the small amount I purchased.

As SOL began dropping I started picking up shares in small orders (@ 7.50, 7.30. 7, 6.75, 6.50. 6.30) for an average price of 6.89. I am down 5.54% on that investment, but I hope it pays off during the upcoming week. SOL's earnings will be reported on the 18th. I'm looking to pick up some more at 6 and lower, should it ever get there.

The trades I closed out this morning brought my account up ~6% or so from Friday. I did lose some on those positions I had in SPY and SOL. I desperately wanted to get out from under my position in SPY. With the bad news circling GS and GM, I'd consider shorting SPY, DIA, and/or QQQQ on up days. 90 is the support level that you want to watch on SPY; if that breaks I would be careful to the downside. In any case, I am beginning to side with those who say the S&P has a ways to go before it can be considered cheap [1].