Mr. EB's Journal

Discussion in 'Journals' started by Mr. EB, Jan 1, 2009.

  1. You are right he can. He made it sound like it was going to be more in the opening post. I was interested if so. Don't be an ass.


    Good job so far Eb.
     
    #31     Jan 6, 2009
  2. Mr. EB

    Mr. EB

    Covered my 5000 ERTS at 17.78. Made about $3600 and 3.9% on the trade from the short near close yesterday.

    I also shorted the market in the first 30 minutes on the thesis the ADP unemployment miss will be bad for the market the rest of the day. ADP December was -693k vs. -493k est.
     
    #32     Jan 7, 2009
  3. Mr. EB

    Mr. EB

    I covered my market short. Hardly made anything on it. Annoyed.
     
    #33     Jan 7, 2009
  4. Mr. EB

    Mr. EB

    +6486 today. +0.97% for the day. Up 3.9% MTD/YTD.
     
    #34     Jan 7, 2009
  5. sc85

    sc85

    Excellent job Mr. EB!

    It will be nice to see a list of stocks you trade each day after market closed. Thx!
     
    #35     Jan 8, 2009
  6. Mr. EB

    Mr. EB

    +$1539 today. +4.1% MTD.
     
    #36     Jan 8, 2009
  7. Mr. EB

    Mr. EB

    Horrid day today. -19,810. -2.93%. +1.1% MTD.
     
    #37     Jan 9, 2009
  8. did you go long at open? hopefully u'll get things straight over the weekend......
     
    #38     Jan 9, 2009
  9. Mr. EB

    Mr. EB

    I ended the first week of 2009 +1.1% YTD vs. the SP500 -1.3% YTD. However I am very frustrated on how it ended. Since I learn more through my mistakes than the winners, I will cover the negative first.

    Mistakes
    Going into Friday I was doing well, up over 4% having made good money every day of the year to that point. I started to get full of myself and dreaming of bountiful gains in 2009. I’ve found whenever that happens, a nasty draw-down is around the corner. Friday’s first trade was a good one with an over 100bps gain on the short side, then I started getting chopped up in the mid-day trading-range action.

    One of Paul Tudor Jones’ lessons is when you are trading poorly, you should cut position sizes or stop trading. I didn’t do that and continued to over-trade. Things actually weren’t too bad until the sell-off late in the day where I was caught long. Consequently I lost over 400bps performance from my peak during the day. Horrid.

    Misses
    Here are some trades I missed during the week.

    Apple (AAPL) had a nice rally off the Steve Jobs press release that said his sickness was a hormone issue and he would remain as CEO for the timing being. The stock rose as I suspect some thought he was much sicker given the Gizmodo’s “Steve Jobs Health Declining Rapidly” post.

    Palm (PALM) ramped hard. Out of all things this week, this missed trade irks me the most. The stock was in the mid-$3s when I started reading about the CES product launch of the Pre. Everyone was very impressed. Given that the last product launch, Foleo, was an utter disaster, expectations were ultra-low. This is the first innovative product for Palm in 4-5 years since the Treo 600. It was up over $6 within a day. Kudos to Jason Raznick for nailing this trade.

    Intuitive Surgincal (ISRG) gapped down on an earnings miss and then rallied 10% on short covering. The next day it declined 10% from the peak the day before. There was a trade in there somewhere.

    Hits
    I had a decent gain fading Apple’s (AAPL) ramp on the Jobs’ hormone news. I figured that the rally was over-done given that Jobs’ health was still a longer-term issue. Moreover the core of the thesis was people would be disappointed with the weak product announcements at Macworld, which turned out to be correct.

    I faded an 11% rally in Electronic Arts (ERTS) for a quick gain next morning. The stock ramped on a number of published take-over rumors from an article on Disney in Fortune, to Variety.com blog, and finally a Fast Money talking head on CNBC who thought the Microsoft buy-out had some credence. Although longer-term the Disney combination may make sense, I thought the Microsoft rumor was not likely.

    Microsoft has indigestion from their last 3 large videogame acquisitions. 1) Rare, maker of N64 GoldenEye and Perfect Dark, has been a disaster. 2) Bungie had been a financial success with Halo, but the studio was spun out because they threatened to quit and didn’t like working for Microsoft. 3) Ensemble Studios, maker of real-time strategy games, was recently shuttered. The core value of EA is their multi-platform sport franchises, which just aren’t as valuable to Microsoft since they would probably want any acquisition to go exclusive to the Xbox 360. All in all even if a buy out does happen for EA someday, all I needed was a short-term pullback after the hype, which happened the following morning.
     
    #39     Jan 11, 2009