that's difficult to answer in those terms. the best i can offer is that you have to be able to handle a whole lot of days in a row like today, where it moves in one direction without any appreciable intraday dips. where you're continually dumping one set of losers and replacing them with another. it is very important to not get "stuck", to maintain the financial ability - and more importantly emotional control - to keep to the plan. imo of all the plans/strategies/etc being plaid on ET and other sites, the NoiseBox is amongst the most difficult. not because of the plan itself - conceptually it is trivial - but because it relies on enormous discipline and control. and i would be lying if i said days like today - or days like a couple we had back in the spring - don't test me. they do. i bleed like everybody else, lol.
covered the short from a couple of days ago at -130 points at 2:02AM at 9610. still have another short, this one from yesterday, at 9564. Despite this huge loss, the morning I'm at better than 25% of my primary financial goal. Luckily, I'm better at stock trading than futures trading.
Good Morning, Kap! I am usually up by 4AM, but last night I'd made a promise to sell those hanging shorts, so I stayed up as long as I could, to unload them before bed. I thought the market would correct today, but I'm not always right and I made a promise to sell them, so I did, (a promise is a promise, after all!) even though today the market will probably plummet, and I would have not lost as much money. OTOH I fooled 'em, because I do have a smaller short position from yesterday and I can still recover a little when the market plummets today. If it does. Tao, I never seem to have the right amount of patience. Either too little or too much, but never just right. lol
Cut the losses, clear the slate, and more importantly clear your mind, today is another day, with new opportunities.
I was a willing Buyer all day on any sign of weakness, right from the off, but it never showed any, so when it reached the point where I would of sold had I been long, i shorted. With the fact that I always exit too early, in hindsight, it seems not such a good idea. Triple or at least double witching today, this may have been a contributing factor yesterday and the lack of corresponding volatility as it drifted, not spiked, to new highs. One major clue yesterday was the ease at which you could get in short, we were indeed feeding the market.
there was no weakness. never got close to anything resembling a buy level. reupholstered part of the short overnight @ 9591. that helps, long way to go, overnight low of 9582 is deeper than i would have expected after a day like yesterday.