Week of 2012 JA 27

SPY rose by 0.2% this week, while my account fell by 1.0%.  I bought some TZA, so my loss floor dropped from -0.9% to -2.2%.  If the market goes up on Monday, I’ll probably get stopped out of RWM.

Spike-lows usually happen every 35‒40 days, but it has now been 42 days since the last one — unless it was that pitiful little down-spike at the open on JA24!  About the only hopeful news I have is that Goldman Sachs told their customers to go long the Russell 2000 on Thursday morning and the Russell hasn’t been that high since.  Assuming that Goldman never gives good advice and always screws over their own customers, this means that the top is in and so my ”short the Russell 2000” investments (RWM and TZA) will now start doing well.  Fingers crossed!

My personal finances are not doing well.  I have put in a request to Schwab to withdraw 10% of this money because I need it for living expenses.  As this is a retirement account for a country that I no longer live in, I can no longer make any deposits so all withdrawals are permanent.  Next week, I plan to add a black slice to the pie-chart, to be labelled “withdrawal”.  I made a withdrawal in 2010 (to prove that I could) but there were no withdrawals in 2011 because results were so poor.  It seems silly to keep drawing down the mortgage line-of-credit when I have so much cash sitting idle in this account.

		│	Daily % gain size																	│	Max % loss			│	Results
Symb	Buy	│	Fri			Mon			Tue			Wed			Thu			Fri		│	Beg		End	│
RWM	JA06	│	-2.9	17		-2.8	17		-3.4	17		-4.3	17		-4.1	17		-4.7	17	│	−5.1		−5.1	│
TZA	JA23	│				-0.8	10		-2.7	10		-5.3	9		-4.9	10		-6.9	9	│	−15.2		−12.8	│
SPY		│	+4.8			+4.9			+4.7			+5.6			+5.1			+5.0		│				│
me		│	-0.5			-0.5			-0.8			-1.2			-1.2			-1.5		│				│

RWM: Bought because DanEric thought that Minor wave (2) was over, but he has had to recant that prediction.  Now he predicts that the market will either bounce on Monday (and then head further downward) or bounce on Tuesday (and then head back up so I lose).  If it heads back up, I guess I’ll have to add DanEric to my list of “people whose predictions aren’t reliable enough to bet on”.

TZA: I am much less worried about this one, because I know that my MACD swing-trade algorithm is profitable on average, even though it occasionally has entire months of nothing but losing trades.

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		JA 23 13:00	JA 23 13:26		$22.46	$22.31		(not yet)

Last weekend I updated the parameters.  On Monday there was a “buy” signal for TZA!  But the robot didn’t buy because its pricing data (via Schwab) was different from my pricing data (via stocksharts.com).  I made the trade manually and then fixed up the program to work correctly with Schwab’s data, which has only current-price and the high and low for the day so far (unlike stockcharts.com, which shows highs and lows for the last hour).