SPY fell by 0.5% this week, while my account rose 0.5%. Both of these figures have returned to within 0.1% of their values as of May 11th, eight weeks ago. My loss-floor has risen to -7.7%.
Euro economy: Greece has reported to the Troika that its citizens have stopped paying bills in Euros. The people have lost faith in their currency, so re-drachma-tization *should* occur soon, but it seems the Hellenic Government still isn’t ready to face that music.
US economy: Friday’s Nonfarm Payroll report was bad, so the market fell (and will probably continue falling for Monday and Tuesday). There have been a slew of negative warnings for the Q2 earnings reports.
US markets: Closed on Wednesday for Independence Day. Tuesday was a half-day.
Friday’s allocations:
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TNA: Max-loss above zero! That hasn’t happened since last November. The stock got sold later that same day, but still — I made it to the “guaranteed” profit level.
Stock-trading robot
The big problem this week was Opera’s NO_MODIFICATION_ALLOWED_ERR, which I got during Tuesday’s stop-adjust (worked correctly on manual retry). Same problem occurred during Friday’s stop-adjust (but the adjustment went through anyway?) Same problem a third time prevented the SRTY purchase from going through (I used a limit order). Clearly, Schwab has screwed around with their order-entry process YET AGAIN. I shall have to look into that this weekend.
Another problem: Schwab failed to reset their ”volume so far today” value to zero for July 4th, so the robot did a spurious stop-update on Wednesday.
| Ticker Symbol | Buy date | Buy price | Sell date | Sell price | Acct Profit | ||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Model | Actual | M | A | Model | Actual | M | A | M | A | ||||||
| TNA | JN 29 11:00 | $52.88 | $52.86 | JL 06 11:00 | JL 06 11:19 | $55.80 | $55.84 | +0.8% | |||||||
| SRTY | JL 06 13:00 | JL 06 15:35 | $43.55 | (Not yet) | |||||||||||
TNA: Robot failed to detect the “sell” signal at 11am. The 10am IWM quote from Schwab was $80.60 (stockcharts.com said $80.54), then the 11am quote from Schwab was $80.54 (stockcharts said $80.44). So the price of IWM “really” fell 10¢ during that hour but the robot saw a 6¢ drop. My previous change to the TNA/TZA models was supposed to allow a “slop” of 0.1% price rise while still matching the sell-rule ”price must have fallen during last hour” — but I had coded it wrong so it actually required that the price had to drop by at least 0.1% (= 8¢ for IWM). The robot tried to sell at noon, but I had already sold manually. Bug has been fixed, but this reduces 2008..2011 TNA profits by 2.7 %-points (no effect on TZA profits). Just dropping the “price must fall” rule would cost an additional 7.7 %-points, so I guess I’ll keep putting that off.
SRTY: Robot tried to buy at the proper time, but got the dreaded NO_MODIFICATION_ALLOWED_ERR. I successfully used a limit-order to obtain the model’s expected price several hours later.
Gold trading
Refinement: Add a 3% hard stop in addition to the 10% trailing. This reduces 5½ year profit from 15.4% to 15.2%, but reduces the maximum loss from 1.5% to only 0.5%.
Here is my revised model:| Using weekly indicators for IAU. |
| Buy signal: |
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| Sell signal: |
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| Buy | Sell | Profit | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2007 JA 19 | 2008 MR 20 | +6.5% | |
| 2008 DE 12 | 2009 MR 03 | +1.5% | |
| 2009 MA 22 | 2009 JN 15 | -0.5% | |
| 2009 SE 04 | 2009 DE 17 | +1.5% | |
| 2010 AR 30 | 2011 AU 25 | +6.7% | |
| 2012 FE 24 | 2012 FE 25 | -0.5% |
On Friday, gold jumped sharply after the NFP report, but then settled back down. Weekly MACD is still rather negative. A “buy” signal for this model does not seem imminent.
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