Week of 2011 DE 15

SPY fell 3.5% this week, while my account rose 1.8%.

		│	Daily % gain size																	│	Max % loss			│	Results
Symbol	since	│	Fri			Mon			Tue			Wed			Thu			Fri		│	Beg		End	│
TZA#2a	NO30	│	-10.7	8		-6.9	8		-1.3	9		+2.8	9		-0.2	9		-2.5	9	│	−13.6		−11.2	│	−4.9%
TZA#2b	NO30	│	-6.0	9		-2.1	9		+3.8	10		+8.1	10		+4.9	10		+2.5	9	│	−9.2		−6.6	│	+9.7%
TNA	DE15	│													-0.8	10		+1.6	10	│	−15.2		−10.0	│
IAU	DE16	│																+0.2	10	│	−5.7		−5.4	│
SPY		│	0.0			-1.5			-2.4			-3.4			-3.1			-3.5		│				│
me		│	0.0			+0.6			+1.5			+2.2			+1.9			+1.8		│				│

IAU: Bought because ZeroHedge recommends it.  They say to hold it for about two weeks.  Toby Connor also recommends gold (hold until it goes stratospheric), but he’s been wrong a lot recently, so I’ll stick to my usual 5½% trailing stop.  If I get only a 38% retrace of the recent drop, that would be a 2.5% profit.

Several times now I have missed trades because I have other things to do in life besides check the market every hour on the hour.  If I can manage to make some money next month, perhaps I should look into a way to automate the trades coming from my model, since it seems to be doing a better job than I am!  Unfortunately, Schwab doesn’t seem to support automated trading.  I found a news article suggesting that they sold their automatic-trading system to UBS.  It is difficult for me to leave Schwab because I have an IRA retirement account with them and am no longer a US resident.

MACD-based swing trades

Ticker Symbol		Buy date			Buy price			Sell date			Sell price			Profit
		Model	Actual		M	A		Model	Actual		M	A		M	A
TZA#2a		DE 07 11:00	NO 30 09:30		$28.31	$29.97		DE 16 11:00	DE 16 11:10		$28.39	$28.58		+0.0%	‒4.9%
TNA#0		DE 09 14:00	skipped		$45.62			DE 12 12:00	skipped		$42.71			‒6.6%	+0.0%
TNA		DE 15 14:00	DE 15 16:50		$40.90	$41.00		not yet	not yet

TZA^#2a: Bought way too early; sold on time.

TNA^#0: Skipped this trade and avoided a significant loss.  Maybe my model should avoid buying TNA when PPO-signal is positive.  That wouldn’t help overall returns much, but it would avoid a bunch of loser trades.  I don’t need any more aggravation!

TNA: Normal swing trade in progress.  Bought in the aftermarket because I was in a business meeting at 2pm, but ended up getting roughly the same price anyway.

Surfing the oscillations

Last week I wrote: “The sell-limit order for a 38% retrace on that second tranche still hasn’t triggered. Now it’s a race to see whether the tranche sells before I get a ‘buy more’ signal from the model or get stopped out.”  Well, the race was won by the sell-limit order!

So I split the tranches of TZA^#2 back into separate trades: the purchase of TZA^#2a was eventually approved by my MACD model and so I sold it per model, while TZA^#2b never did get approval and was sold at a Fibonacci retracement as shown on this chart.