Thursday, November 13, 2008

Bookkeeping: Technical Difficulty

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For the record, due to technical reasons my ETF trades won't work until tomorrow the folks at Marketocracy.com tell me since they began trading on a new exchange.

all of the ETFs in your open orders page recently moved from AMEX to NYSE-Arca. Our system missed these corporate actions, which is why your trades will not fill.

So aside from not being able to log in all morning, once I was in I could not do the trades necessary. I am about 24% short which I would have liked to reduce by 1/3rd as I wrote when the S&P was at 830 (I updated the entry below real time to note that) - if the market gets back north of S&P 875 I'd probably cut another 20-25% off to get less hedged for a short term move up.

I would of married that with a purchase of Ultra Russell 2000 (TWM) back when we crossed back over 840 with about a 12-15% stake for the short run to have a longer bias (still keeping the cash high) but moving short exposure to long. Our current long ETF exposure is close to nil.

Instead as the market rallies our short exposure is going to start biting us big time and our long exposure is pathetic.... I am just hoping this rally does not take off at anything greater than +3% for the day. We are quite oversold so a large (short term) rally of magnitude can happen once those stops below S&P 840 were taken out.

This reversal already has cost about 1.5% of performance... and counting.

Again this market is nothing about fundamentals or individual stocks, so your allocations are everything. Being unable to adjust them just kills you with a market that swings in 2% increments every hour. I've been using ETFs instead of individual stocks, hence the moves I would be doing as noted above.

But this was my game plan - if we break back below 835 I'd abandon (reverse) the above and get back the heavy short exposure... but for now I'd be leaning back to long assuming a rally that can get to mid 900s on S&P potentially.

But it's a moot point as for the day we're frozen out on all ETF trading which makes up about a third of the portfolio. I can't even sell down my "cash" ETFs to buy long individual stocks since those are indeed ETFs on the same exchanges...

I'm done for the day and peeved - this is 2 days in a row of the same situation. This market is hard enough even as it is without being screwed like this.

5 comments:

rosesryellow2 said...

Think of these rallies as a pullback in a voracious bull market, just in reverse. We were so close to breaking down today... the uncertainty is why I, like you, are hedged. Nonetheless if the higher we move the shorter I want to get.

These rallies are bear candy imo.

rosesryellow2 said...

am hedged

TraderMark said...

That's not the issue - the issue is I turned with the market and was locked out of the ability to turn which ruined the performance metrics. This was a 10% intraday swing which I was locked into even when calling the swing. That's a major issue with me since people who come to the blog in the future aren't aware of that issue.

That's a big problem to me. Very big. I took about a 15% swing versus the market in 3 hours since I could do nothing.

namreleb said...

I will vouch for you! You made the call to dump the shorts and go long at 1:20 today - about 17 minutes after the bottom. That's excellent trading!

Doug said...

Mark,

You have noted in the past that you have found stocks attractive on fundamentals, but that can't be bought because of the current market enviroment. A noted economist has published a paper this month labeling our current problem a "fearcession"--ie, not one brought on by fundamentals, but instead by a a massive loss of confidence. https://www.wellscap.com/docs/ecomonic_and_market_perspective/EMP_1108.pdf

He makes a pretty interesting argument.......

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