Thanks Russell!

I won't lie to you, I freaked out today.

And that despite my mellow morning in the sun and the surf.

I rushed back from the beach and due to my enthusiasm to get started, sat naked, that's right, naked in my office chair as I compiled a whole new quote screen to devote to the Russell Rebalancing. Could I have done that yesterday, or even, (gasp) the day before? Yes. But then I wouldn't have had the excuse to sit naked in my office chair.

My daughter was the first to state the obvious...

She: "Daddy, you naked?"

Me: "Yes, Daddy is naked."

She: "Daddy, you working naked? That's silly! (laughter)"

Me: "Go eat some breakfast with Mommy. JUDY! What the fuck! I told you I'd be busy today!"

Anyway, so I noticed, when going through the Rebalancing list which I posted links to here a few times that a lot of the insurers I like to trade were being added. Among them, RE, PRE, ENH, and AXS. There were more insurers, but those are the ones I typically trade. I also found a few stocks that I had never traded before but were at good prices and near highs. Among them, AWH, AYR, RRR, and LBY. There was also CPA a stock I trade occasionally.

So after the first 15 minutes passed, I bought small positions in each of them and sticking with my new "style" I planned on holding them. Unfortunately, every single stock dropped pretty rapidly. Not one of them made the holding part easy... on top of this, I got jacked in SPG and VNO. Then I lost in CF and MOS. It was, in a word, a bloodbath.

Things settled down and all of the stocks I mentioned that were on my Russell list dropped into ranges. I bought more in these ranges, throughout the day. Besides these adds, I had 3 winning trades in TNH and I net about $750 in them. So that helped my mental state, but not too much because I was still down significantly, probably a few thousand dollars.

This is how things went when the first imbalance was reported at 3:30.

It was in CAI, a stock that was not on any list I could find. I thought this was interesting. Because no other imbalances were coming out I was able to watch CAI trade. It spiked up quickly, like a hybrid trade, and then settled down. This gave me a good plan on what to do with my positions. I added aggressively and then put sell limits 30-70 cents above where the market was trading.

All of a sudden, the insurers began to spike.






Which was great. I took a lot of the profits on the way up, only holding 400 or 500 shares into the actual imbalance.

But the one that worked best for me was CPA simply because I had built up a good position in him throughout the day. Early, he was one of my worst losers but I was able to hold and get out of 1000 shares near to top of the move. I had placed sell limits at 65.50.



And that was the day. There were a couple of names on the list, LBY and RRR that I had big positions in (2000 shares each) and had to take losses on because they didn't have buy imbalances. Actually, LBY had a sell imbalance! And another that failed me was ARWR, a "fly" stock. He too had a sell imbalance despite being added to the Russell Micro index. I took a decent loss on him.

But overall, the Rebalancing net me close to $5,000. It was a tough one to sweat out with the market acting like it did today, but it worked out.

And if you read this blog daily, you know how thankful I am right now for green days.

Oh, and a tip of the hat to Ray over at Hybridtalk for doing such a great job getting the information about the rebalancing out. Perhaps I won't need you to pass my resume around after all!

Anyway, here's the stats:

P&L, $1736
Best, CPA, $1021
Worst, LNN, -$578

shares traded, 42,400
stocks traded, 19, 9 positive, 10 negative
total trades, 151