Slope of Hope Blog Posts

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Ugh. I don't like days like today.

On the plus side, I did some things that were worthwhile:

+ I tightened up stops on all my positions;

+ I took profits in a few places where appropriate

+ I dialed-back my commitment to only 50%, in order to preserve profits.

However, during the course of the day, I kept trying to take advantage of the bounce-in-progress, and I lost money on almost every day trade. It's one of those days where it feels like I'm all thumbs.

I confess that the market did indeed seem terribly oversold, and a bounce would have made sense, but today's attempt at a rally was pathetic. Just look at the IWM below. It peeked above its breakpoint level by about a penny, and then it just fell absolutely to pieces.

0609-iwm2

As I sit here now, I am entirely short again with 45 positions, and I don't have a single large equity ETF position. The only large-ish positions I've got are FXE and DBC, as well as some GDX. Everything else is just individual equities.

The cold fact of the matter is that most of the stocks I want to trade are so far below attractive entry points that I must wait. Just look at SKX, below. If this stock were to bounce toward $18, it would be screaming – itching – begging you to short it. As it is now, there is a lot of risk to the upside, and there's no way I'm interested in taking that kind of risk.

0609-SKX

So I'm in a bit of a quandary. The shorts that I have in place right now are attractive charts, but given the mountain of charts that would be attractive, but only after a hearty bounce, it makes me worry that the small caps have got to rally. That's one of the reasons I kept trying to hop on board the IWM train, but my toes kept getting run over by its wheels.

I'm not that crazy about being totally short, but my desire to get long today was really the only source of "damage" today, so I'm likewise not too crazy about taking on big long positions either. As they say, cash is a position too, which is why I'm having about half of my portfolio sitting in boring old cash as the market tries to figure out what's next.

At least we don't have to listen to any more of those "the market has fallen 7 days in a row, and the odds of it falling an 8th are about the same as Roseanne Barr being hired as the new GoDaddy girl." The clock has been reset.