It's funny that we can do well without having learned when to take profit and when to swallow a loss. That's a big problem for me. Lisa seems to have some handles on that issue and I am trying to understand how she does what she does, but so far I don't have much of a clue.
Unfortunately I'm highly margined, but I feel I need the margin in order to help me get to my goal while I can. I don't know how long the bull market will last, and I'd like to meet my goal and (mostly) cash out before the bull market is over.
There's no point in having enough money to do what you want, if you're not going to use it to do what you want.
One problem I'm grappling with is with increasing goals. The low interest rates, the devaluation of the dollar, all make me think that the goal I set before, needs to be revised. Some travel guy said on CNBC recently that the fares are so low they tempt us to travel, you can get where you want to go for $200, but then you get off the plane and the cabfare to your hotel is $200. The exchange rate creates severe costs for US travelers, though the international situation makes travel less appealing. I guess I'm hoping things will go back a little way to where they were before, but in my heart I know a lot is ruined forever.
The economy was in trouble before 9/11 but 9/11 and the events after it have taken a lot of the fun and frolic away from thuoghts of international travel. Though I sure wish I were spending a month in England right now. I loved it there.
I'm not as close to my original goal as you are, but worse, I'm thinking I need to increase the goal because of all these issues. I suppose I can reassess when I reach the initial goal, but long periods of getting almost no interest on the capital now has to be factored into how much capital we need.
I had an excellent day yesterday, but I'm anxious about the degree I'm out on margin and the fact that things are going so well. After a big advance, this is often when I take a big hit, have a big setback. So I admire the coolness with which you sold out day before yesterday.
Maybe I should set stop losses. I need to switch brokers to have the kind of features I want in regard to stop losses, but now, with eLizabeth I can explore using all those brokers that have features I couldn't use before.
I need to improve my capacity to preserve my gains.
Linda
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