Week of 2012 NO 09

SPY fell by 2.7% this week, erasing the last 15 weeks of gains.  My account rose 0.4% and has been hovering in the same area for the last 10 weeks. The loss-floor fell to -7.6%.

Friday’s allocations:

Daily % gain size │ Max loss Sym  Buy │  Fri  Mon  Tue  Wed  Thu  Fri │ Beg   End   IAU  AU14 │ +0.6  14  +0.6  14  +0.9  14  +0.9  14  +1.0  14  +1.0  14  │ +0.1 +0.1 SRTY ¹  NO05 │ -0.3  15  -0.3  15  -0.3  15  -0.3  0  │ -1.0 -1.0 SRTY ²  NO07 │ -0.1  15  +0.5  15  +0.3  15  │ -1.2 -0.7 UGLD  NO09 │ -0.0  15  │ -1.3 -1.3 SPY │ +12.8     +13.0     +13.9     +11.3     +10.0     +10.1     │ me │ -6.0 -6.2 -6.0 -6.1 -5.4 -5.6 │ floor │ -6.4 -6.7 -6.7 -7.9 -7.9 -7.6 │

Summary of action: There were two short-equity trades this week — a gain and a loss that cancelled each other out.  Meanwhile, gold’s price rose.

Stock-trading robot

Ticker Symbol		Buy date			Buy price			Sell date			Sell price			Acct Profit
		Model	Actual		M	A		Model	Actual		M	A		M	A
SRTY ¹		NO 05 10:00			$39.93	$39.92		NO 05 11:00			$39.10			-0.3%
SRTY ²		NO 07 12:00			$41.10			NO 09 11:00			$42.20			+0.371%	+0.349%

SRTY ²: Model and actual profits differ by only 0.022%, but this was enough to create a round-off error (model 0.4%, actual 0.3%).

Gold trading

Gold rose this week.  Daily MACD finally turned positive, so I scaled in with UGLD, which is a triple-leveraged “side-bet with the banksters” that the price of gold will continue to go up.  My account is now 60% long gold, which feels rather overexposed — but gold’s price moves very slowly.  Basic plan is to hold UGLD until daily MACD goes negative.

Original plan was to use a 17% trailing stop for UGLD, but I didn’t like how much that cost so I convinced myself that 9% should be enough for a short swing.  We shall see.  I have no model for this trade, so it feels “naked”.

Seasonal Trading Strategy

I’ve been waiting to try out Sy Harding’s seasonal trading strategy, but I haven’t yet put on a position for the winter and Sy hasn’t either.  In this post he is quite clear about what his strategy is: buy an equity index fund when daily MACD(12,26,9) goes positive after October 16th.  It seems that Sy buys the Dow Jones Industrials for the winter, but I was thinking of buying small-caps like I always do (perhaps SCHA, which has no trading fees for Schwab customers).