I did add cash at the end of 2008. Forgot how much. I belived it was 100k. My starting balance this year is 756k. On October 31, 2008, my balance was 1.2M. There was less than 100k in early 2009. My whole networth was in this account. What saved me is that I can tolerate the pain. I never lost sleep since I have another good paying job. Luckily the IRS approved my trading business and I was able to use Mark to Market accounting. So I was able to offset my wages against loss in 2008, 2009. I did not believe that I can recover so quickly. My approach is rather simple. Build a diversified portfolio by selling puts. Now I don't want to push my luck any further. I want to do this in a much smaller scale. That is why I liquidated the account on Tuesday. Talking about timing. I left at least 150k on the table...I usually don't close the positions until I was assigned the puts.
Dig out old files and realized that I actually put in 140k in 2008. During the following three years I withdrew some and deposit some with net total deposit of 110k from 08 till now. If I add 110k to the beginning of 2008 NAV 603k. My 3 year return till now is 20.7% vs s&p 8.8%. If I go back to 2006 when I first started trading, my record is even better. I am up 50.9% in this 5-year period while s&p is up 2.75%. I have never done any of this calculation before until now. I think I may cancel my plan of investing in rental property and get back into the market. What do you think? P.S. In the previous post, there is a typo. 1.2M is in October 07 or 08.