As I wrote this morning before the opening bell, I went to bed terribly nervous on Wednesday night. I woke up to red quotes, however, so Thursday looked like it was going to be an absolute blast, but in the end, I wound up with simply a modest profit instead of a wheelbarrow of cash. In the midst of all the chaos, I had another anxiety source, which was this sucker:
As I believe I mentioned recently, my area in Palo Alto had a planned power outage for all day today and all-day next Thursday. I prepared for this by acquiring an Ecoflow whole-house battery backup system. I worked closely with my electrician on Tuesday to carefully pick which circuits I wanted to power, since I only needed to do “mission critical” stuff since power outages are exceptionally rare.
Considering the fact that hardly a single word was spelled properly, you can guess who it was that did the labeling.
My trading day starts at 6:30 a.m., and I was informed by Palo Alto that the power would go off at 8 a.m. Now, in theory, that shouldn’t be an issue, because I’ve got this battery system set up, but anyone who has ever worked with, well, anything at all in life knows that rarely does anything go to plan. So, I figured it was very likely I would have ninety minutes to do housekeeping on my portfolio before I had to flee to some nearby coffee house to spend my trading day.
I am delighted, and more than a little surprised, to report that everything actually worked. Although the brief switchover from the “grid” to my battery turned off a couple of my machines, I was able to power them back up, and at least as far as my working day was concerned, it was as if nothing happened.
The battery informed me I had enough power for about thirty hours, so I figured I’d be in good shape. Funny enough, just after the market closed at 1 p.m., all the power came back on (four hours in advance of the city’s promise to restore power by 5 p.m.) Thus, it worked beautifully, and I’m confident next Thursday should go smoothly as well thanks to this guy:
As for my trading day, here are the highlights:
- Portfolio One: 100% cash still.
- Portfolio Two: had been 100% in BITI (inverse Bitcoin) but, out of nothing but sheer nerves, I decided to dump the entire thing and take my profits. That was pure dumb luck, because the “spike” news happened only about ten minutes afterward, so I dodged a bullet on that one. Thus, this is now 100% cash as well!
- Portfolio Three: 100% committed to options, and a nice boost to its overall valuation today. As usual, the options all have at least three months of life in them.
- Portfolio Four: 174% committed spread among twenty-one individual equities. No large positions.
- Portfolio Five: Slashed risk from 220% to a whisper-thin 61% since I had tight stops on my big SPY and QQQ shorts and they got stopped out (with good profits). This portfolio is spread among a mere ten equity shorts.
I gave myself an A- grade in today’s Trader’s Diary, since I only like to give myself an A when I do terrific, and I definitely had a fumble or two today.
On a final note, I will mention in Portfolio Five I do have one “mad money” trade of SPY $660 puts which expire tomorrow which I bought after the spike news. It’s a small enough position that if it gets trashed, no big deal, but it’ll be nice gravy if traders get the pre-weekend jitters tomorrow.
