Five Days Down

Making money should never be easy...  yet it was the first two weeks of January.  I made a lot of money.  But I didn't do anything about it.

 Now -- in five days, I have given it all back.  What the market gives, it takes back twice as fast.  Had I been listening to my inner voice... I would have taken more precautions to lock in the gains.  The market is a beast that can turn on you in a second.

 It does not care about value or anything else.  When it wants to drop, it will drop through all your fancy plans and charts.

 If I'm really an investor then days like this should not bother me.  But the fact is -- I think I need to be more of an active swing trader and take the profits as they roll.  Staying long and giving everything back on each and every major correction is too hard to deal with.   I did quite well taking profits.  It's the ones that I held onto that returned back to their trendlines.

 I did buy a lot of names on trendline support today.  Small caps are broken now. And I'm still losing huge chunks of money every day.

 I wish I could be a daytrader and be in cash all the time but I am terrible at that.  That only guarantees I bleed to death slowly.

 I still have not lost money for the year but tomorrow it goes red.  Hard to keep going after five days of this.