It is the end of the 2nd quarter of 2012. Summary year-to-date results follow:
SPY +8.4% S&P 500
IWM +7.9% Russell 2000
TLT +3.3% 20 Year U.S. Treasury
EEM +3.1% Emerging Markets
GLD +2.1% Gold
SLV -1.0% Silver
Boy, did I get whipsawed on Thursday. The move off the bottom was close to 5% in one day plus an hour. This kind of thing will happen. Covering WFM Whole Foods might have been a good move, the ALXN Alexion more feeling based. In hindsight, trading is real easy.
What can I learn from this? To wait for market closes, unless a pre-determined price level or percentage loss is broken. Sometimes waiting for two consecutive closes is done to avoid whipsaws. Of course, there will be specific times when any set strategy can be micro-tweaked to succeed or fail, in hindsight.
Because of the whipsaw action I stayed mostly away from the stock market today. Next week has the July 4th holiday during the middle of the week. Then later in July, I will be traveling and less likely to take on and keep positions.
Since I've been giving out letter grades, the grades have mostly in the letter C range. So it is no surprise that am now behind the returns of the top ETFs on the list. As always with options, could be better, could be worse. Comparisons to index performance can be an interesting measurement. However, option traders might be long or short, and I trade a lot more than SPY and IWM.
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