The Black Box

[ljk]

I'm still trying to lighten up; I have too many stock positions. I closed so many and even though I closed the profitable ones, now I'm down about 20% of the value of my whole portfolio. Almost everything I sold went down afterwards, as did the ones I held, so it's not that I necessarily sold the "wrong" ones.

I have continued to trade profitably every day, though with lower profit targets than before the market turn, and still I'm losing a lot of ground.

So I'm trying to focus on whether to unload losing positions, even though I am sure a lot of them will be moving up if and when the market starts bulling it up again.

Luckily my three warriors picked up today due to some excellent earnings news, and they have been pillars for me, both for trading and for longer swings.

On balance, I'm worried. I saved myself from margin calls but not from deterioration of value. I don't want to disregard the possibility that Syl could be right, that we could be in for a longer, serious, downtrend, even though my own perceptions are that the market will start to spring up again very well. Sometimes it's prudent to follow the more conservative view. Sometimes it's prudent to be prudent. Which I wouldn't know, since I'm extravagent by nature. I have to work hard to change that, and it's not coming easily.

All this is by way of saying, I'm struggling with whether to sell stocks I'm holding that are losing positions. I am holding several that I bought too high (in the current perspective). If the China Portals make another moon flight, as I believe they will, that could make up for a lot of these losers, but that's not necessarily a good reason to keep holding them.

Linda