Getting Ahead for the Little Guy
I’d heard the expression before – that bear markets can be bad for both bulls and bears – but I didn’t know what it meant until just this last month.
With a couple of explosive rallies this month – including the one yesterday that took the market up around 10% in a single day – I [...]
Investing is boring, at least when it is done right.
The losses I have in mutual funds is making me ill (though I have moved a lot of it around where it is better protected). What little I’ve dared to trade on the options market has caused some real stress; it is a roller-coaster ride of [...]
I just checked in on my Roth IRA, which is still in mutual funds. Fortunately, one of the funds they allow is “cash reserves,” where I allocated nearly 1/4th of my account in July or so. That portion of my account now represents over a third of what is left.
And this week marks a hallmark. [...]
Being a bear can be a real… bear, sometimes. In general, the markets go up much more than they go down, which works to the disadvantage of those who play more to the bearish side. But there are three advantages to being a bear:
#1 – Since prices go down much faster than they go up, [...]
Last week, I mentioned selling a naked put as an option in an extremely volatile market like this one. On Wednesday night, I put my money where my mouth is. It didn’t actually execute until late Thursday morning, executing at the price I demanded, but it worked so far. We’ll see how well it works [...]
I spent some time this last week reading interviews with different investors over the last 30 years. Some took place around the 1987 stock market crash, the 1982 Savings & Loan crash, or during the recession earlier this decade. What is really interesting to me was how they were describing the public hysteria at those [...]
The VIX (the CBOE Volatility Index) hit 80 today. I didn’t know it went that high.
In broad terms, it is a measure of the fear in the marketplace. Generally speaking, a VIX above 30 is taken as an indicator that the market has hit a bottom. But it has been above 30 for the last [...]
My managed trading account took a little bit of a beating this month. I was disappointed, but then looked at my IRA accounts. Apparently I beat them by over 18%, which is pretty sad. I’m actually kinda sick to my stomach over it all. In my Roth, I had about a quarter of my money [...]
I’ve talked before about Exchange Traded Funds. I’m a fan. You get most of the advantages of being in stock – including being able to turn on a dime and being able to enter and exit without limitation or penalty, plus the advantages of diversification within specific industries (or across multiple industries in an index [...]
I don’t know if historically this was the worst week EVAR for the stock market, but it was close.
My IRAs got pretty clobbered. Even my trading account took a hit – my bearish plays on oil didn’t pay off as well as some of my other positions lost as I gambled on an expected bounce [...]