I was spot-on thursday morning, going long at the lows of the days, then turned into a butthead at 11:43 a.m. Friday, went short, and gave it all back.
The other thing is that if the market kept going straight down there were have been hundreds of destroyed traders. Many of them would have spoke up. But nowadays most professional trade for regression and most amatures buy and hold. So what you got was the perfect trade yesterday for profits buy a majority of traders who visit this board. Almost everyone here has been trained to buy gap downs in the market. So I would not expect too many losers.
I'm quite interested in seeing how things pan out over the next couple of months in the markets. Right now I feel a lot like what was described in "Reminiscenses of a Stock Operator", where he talks about being individually bearish/bullish on a market too soon. In particular I monitor techs, and we've been puttering along at roughly these levels since about late May. I'm waiting to see a downwards move for the summer, but part of me is starting to wonder exactly what will be the trigger of that starting to happen (aside from perhaps weak earnings reports/forecasts). It would seem that the market keeps shaking off various bits of bad news, but isn't really interested in moving out of the current range just yet...
Choad: Get The Nature of Risk by Justin Mamis. An incredible book - and will solve the pysch issue you just mentioned.
Listen, face up to the fact that YOU suck and everyone else is a MASTER trader. That explains the kind of postings we see on chat boards. THEY are all better than YOU. Learn to live with it.