Weekly: Fifth week lower

Market moves down for the fifth week in a row. I lose about 1% this week. Biggest problems were Tesla, Qualcomm and Apple, but the overall tone is negative. I’ve lost about 6% from my peak account value for 2019. I continue to be cautious, with a lot of dry powder.

As I often do I am linking the Trace Adkins song, Arlington in honor of Memorial Day (link).

Monthly: Music in me, grade C

It was a tough month of sledding. The Dow posted four weeks of losses. I gave back quite a bit from the record high. Grade for the month is a gentleman’s grade of C. I lost about 2% for the month, off about 1% for the week, up over 20% for 2019.

A couple of songs seem relevant to this trading week, Manic Monday (link1), and I’ve got the Music in Me (link2). The first because of the 600+ point decline on Monday, the second for the line, I heat up, I cool down. This week, I roll up, I roll down, and end with a loss of about 1%. For the year, I am up 20.4%.

Here are some etfs and their year to date (not including dividends).

QQQ +18.7% US mostly tech
SPY +14.4% US large cap stocks
IWM +14.1 US small cap

TLT +3.7% US 20-year treasuries
EEM +3.1% Emerging markets equities

GLD -0.5% gold
SLV -6.9% silver

So at +20.4% I am having a good year. I was having a better one, before the tariff tweets, but the give back has been modest after such a big run up.

This week, new longs include tiny positions in BYND and WMT. Tesla caused some heart burn, but is still above my mental stop level of 200. I got whipped around by the wide swings. I often rebalanced closer to delta neutral only to have to redo or undo trades as the market went down, then up, then back down again. I lost about 1% for the week, about 2% for the trading month, up 20% for 2019.

For now, I'll stay in the middle of the stream, staying near delta neutral on a lot of underlyings. I am cautious, as nearly always. 

Weekly: Tariff two step and Disney

What a week. Tariff tweets moved the market lower on several days. Despite no agreement, the market recovered some on Friday. My many short strangles on Disney came in for profit, when the stock didn’t move much after earnings. I could have exited better, but DIS boosted an otherwise dismal week. I was down about 2.2% for the week, but it could have been much worse. I took a lot of losses, especially in AAPL, cutting long exposure as the market moved lower. I am slightly long most underlyings. I survive an earnings miss as TTD TradeDesk.

The recovery on Friday, despite the failed IPO by UBER and no agreement on trade, is discouraging for would be bears. If the market can’t go down on that news, the path of least resistance may be higher to neutral, so that’s how I am positioned. It can all change in an instant. I continue to focus on my desired delta. Once in a while I slip back into the mode of counting wins and losses, but come back to my 2019 focus on net delta.

Weekly: Spring showers

A brief selling squall had me scrambling for cover. My brief foray into buying calls ended with mixed results. Overall, a small profit for the week, so I’ll take that, when I felt like I was trading poorly. I continue to be relatively cautious. I made a lot of trades on Disney and Apple this week. Not much profit involved, at least not yet, but a lot of activity.