Bookkeeping: Reversing Yesterday's Call

Well I was hopeful we could have some sort of actual run in the global growth names, but went with my heart instead of my mind. The heart will kill you in investing world :)

We added some incremental global growth exposure yesterday - not a ton mind you (I only did 6 names - we own far more and we only added half a percent to one and a half percent to each) and they are coming back to haunt us today. So I'm reversing just about everything I did yesterday in these names. As I said repeatedly .... to the market, these might as well be subprime lenders, since this market is technically driven and all that matters are oil prices and charts. They bounced off oversold levels and unless oil persists upward - those opportunities are being used to simply sell/short the names. The fundamentals mean nothing. So we'll respect that.

Much like banks or retailers or the like from the past few quarters, these are now only buyable when they get crunched - you have to hope you buy them near the nadir and then sell into strength. Disobeying that rule probably cost us 0.3%- 0.4% today alone. You keep wanting to believe that earnings power trump money flow but that's just not reality in this current era. And again, I keep repeating myself, but most breakouts are failing - in this current environment you sell the breakout and buy the breakdown - so very backwards to everything we learn from years upon years of the market - but this is a new market. That rule holds unless you are in a few select subsectors - and those sectors have nothing to do with global growth.

It's just too hard to make money with these right now when you have to wake up each morning and predict the movement of oil and jump on either the long or short side, and then close out your position by 3:59 PM to repeat the same thing the next morning. That doesn't work for investors. Only daytrading.

This market continues to be a grind which is strange to say with the market up strongly today. But much of what is up is what was being sold Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. So it is deceiving. Today the money is back into our healthcare, retail, homebuilder (and financial) stocks - just the type of stuff no one wanted earlier in the week. And so it continues. Trendless and without leadership.