Why does the market have to be like this? Especially to a nice guy like me?
Here, let’s take Netflix as an example. This is a perfect instance of the kind of pulling-my-hair-out insanity I’ve been dealing with. Below is a chart of NFLX. The first arrow marks, at 9:57 a.m., where I bought June puts. Now even though these goddamn things have MONTHS of time on them, a mere two hours (!!!) later, where the second arrow is, I dumped them at a loss of about 7%. That was very close to the top tick of the day. By the close, they were nicely above my purchase price (and, of course, the daily chart looks terrific, which is why I bought them in the first place). Jesus!
Now, just to make clear that I’m not an irredeemable fuck-up, my 19 other positions pretty much stayed put during the day, but the NFLX instance above is just one example of the “death by a thousand cuts” I’ve been suffering for all of 2023 so far. Screw-ups like this have cost me a ton of money, but this market is such that good trades can look bad in a very big hurry, and I am not one who is of the disposition to just grit my teeth through the pain.
I will say that, for the FIRST TIME this entire year, we’ve broken the uptrend. The chart of the /NQ also looks like like this (actually it’s even more clear that there’s a trend break), so this is kind of encouraging.
The sucky thing is that the /ES is merely in the same place it was just before Jerome “Zero Credibility” Powell did his FOMC thing which sent the market exploding higher. So all we’ve done is unwind (yet again………) those gains. The grinding sine wave we’ve been experiencing since February 1st has been a total nightmare, and this week in particular has been utterly unhinged, since we’ve received an absolute tidal wave of bearish news, and only in the final 40 minutes on Thursday did we see some honest-to-God weakness.
I truly resent the holy hell out of this market, and I hope I can make peace with it again soon.
Now, on a totally different subject – – the missing comments! Ruffpup, are you there?
See, I’ve never seen this happen myself (which explains my inexcusable indifference) but we’ve been continuing to work on a successful conclusion. Here’s what you need to do:
- Next time you fire up SlopeTalk, Shift-F5 the hell out of it;
- For added good measure, CLEAR YOUR CACHE from the beginning of time in your browser;
- Most important of all, if you see a message vanish again, email me and send me a screen shot of the version you are using; we have added this About box to SlopeTalk for this express purpose).
I seriously hope we can put this issue to bed, because we have SO much more important stuff to do.
