I bought puts yesterday when the market was up 320. It closed up 416.

I bought more this morning when the market was up 50. It then proceeded to go up over 100.

So I'm certainly not getting these things are the cheapest price possible, and they are in the red so far. But I'm honestly totally cool with that. I am basing these purchases on the notion that this is a big bear market rally and is simply another profit opportunity.

I notice one thing I said in last night's post got the attention of a few commenters (including Winace, who described this blog as having become a "clan", which I find a disappointing assessment). I wrote about my "distaste for trading against the primary trend". Others jumped in and said that's ridiculous, because I traded against the bullish trend for so long.

You are right, and that was poorly phrased. But I can also say honestly that I have a "distaste for losses", and one should not assume I've never lost money in my life. In any case, we all know that trading against the primary trend is a mistake. So that was really the only point I was trying to make.

As for this morning, we got a very early bounce (about 50 points higher on the Dow) to tack onto yesterday's monster rally, but as of this writing (merely 15 minutes into the open) it seems to be backing away from a retracement line. This is a very short-term line, drawn from the peak of February 1 down to the bottom made a couple of days ago. But the number of "hits" on these retracements seems to give it some credibility, so I'll be watching these levels.

Here's a longer-term view, so you can see the basis of this minute-bar based retracement.