Week of 2012 AU 31

SPY fell by 0.3% this week, while my account rose 0.3%.  The loss-floor is now -10.4%.  Basically, my account is unchanged over the last three months, while the broad market is up significantly.

US market news: Dr. Ben Bernanke gave a speech at Jackson Hole WY.  My expectation was that there would be a microburst of inflation just after his speech, to act as an APPLAUSE! sign for the markets.  I think the microburst did happen, and previous metals went up a lot, but equities were weak so I didn’t make as much overall as hoped.  Still, a positive week!

Friday’s allocations:

Daily % gain size │ Max loss Sym  Buy │ Fri Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri │ Beg   End   IAU  AU14 │ +0.5  14  +0.5  14  +0.5  14  +0.4  14  +0.4  14  +0.7  14  │ -0.4 -0.4 TZA  AU23 │ -0.2  15  -0.3  15  -0.3  15  -0.3  15  -0.3  0  │ -1.2 -0.6 URTY  AU23 │ +0.1  15  +0.2  16  +0.4  16  +0.6  16  +0.2  16  +0.4  16  │ -0.8 -0.3 PPLT  AU29 │ -0.1  7  +0.1  7  │ -0.4 -0.3 SPY │ +12.8     +12.8     +12.7     +12.8     +11.9     +12.5 │ me │ -8.6 -8.7 -8.5 -8.4 -8.9 -8.3 │ floor │ -11.5 -10.6 -10.6 -10.4 -10.8 -10.4 │

PPLT: Bought this platinum ETF on a whim, to bulk up my “precious metals” allocation to 20%.  Bought at 11:25am, which was about two hours too early.  So far, so good!  Am using a 5½% trailing stop.

Stock-trading robot

InteractiveBrokers: They don’t offer registered accounts, just margins.  Obviously they are making their profit on rehypothetication of customer deposits, not on transaction fees.  Now that US courts have ruled repeatedly that margin accounts have no consumer protections at all (your deposit is a loan to the broker; any loans from TBTF banks are senior to yours), it seems too dangerous to trade with anything other than a retirement account.  So I’ve given up on IB.

Disnat.com: An online broker associated with Desjardins Bank in Québec.  No API, but seems scriptable like Schwab.com.  They say that Canadian retirement accounts may not trade options at all.  They claim this is a government regulation, although OptionsXpress seems to disagree.

HostMDS.com: Quote-fetch timeouts at 2pm on Thursday and 1pm on Friday.  This is ridiculous.  HostMDS delenda est!

VPSville.ca: I am thinking of selecting these guys as my new ISP.  Online reviews are quite mixed; it seems they expect their customers to know what they’re doing, so less-knowledgable customers are unhappy with them.  Prices for a virtual private server (which is all VPSville offers) are double or triple what I am paying to HostMDS — but a VPS should allow me to leave Opera running all the time, which should cut way back on timeouts.

Ticker Symbol		Buy date			Buy price			Sell date			Sell price			Acct Profit
		Model	Actual		M	A		Model	Actual		M	A		M	A
TZA		AU 23 13:00			$17.02			AU 28 11:00	AU 27 14:54		$16.45	$16.68		-0.5%	-0.3%
URTY		AU 23 13:00	AU 23 13:01		$61.13	$61.07		(Not yet)

TZA: This trade had a “near-death experience” Monday morning, so I invoked the “experimental new rule” from last week and sold it at the top of the rebound.  The experimental new rule suggested selling “after the first hour where price moves against me”, but instead I watched the market all day and picked the sell-time manually.  My result (2:54pm) is very close to what the new-rule suggestion would have chosen (3:00pm).  Had I not intervened, this trade would have stopped out with a bigger loss the following morning, so it’s a WIN for the experimental new rule!

URTY: Normal trend trade in progress.