"Smart Money Is Buying This Market" - Maria Bartiromo

I figured it was a good idea to post that weekly graph of the futures. As you can see, we're just about where we were on January 1st, 2007.

It's a different story for the Dow. It's still up a few hundred points for the year.

Anyway, it was a wild day for stock trading yet again. With Hurricane Dean looming in the Caribbean and huge companies like CFC having serious trouble, this volatility shows no sign of ending. I'll say that at least in my mind, it feels like our entire financial system is about to collapse. So far, I don't think stocks have fully priced in that type of fear. I think it will take that type of fear induced capitulation plus some financial companies opening up their books and letting people know how deep the sub-slime is to hit some type of bottom... that, or some type of FED bailout in the form of a deep rate cut. But whatever, I'm a trader.

Here's my best stock of the day, UBB.



Ironically enough, I missed the short that melted the stock from 2pm into the close. I made my money on the long side, between 9:45 and 10:00. I actually think that's a really good thing because it tells me that I'm very open-minded about the market right now. I got crippled for a couple of months after the February panic because I could only see shorts. So I'm happy that while the tone of the market is overwhelmingly bearish right now I managed to pull good money from the long side.

At the same time that I caught the UBB long, I also made good money on corresponding longs in AB and CNS. It was all about the financials rallying at that point of the day due to some Fed action. Again, I'm not an economist so I really don't know what they did. But, I don't care. As a trader my job is to react to movement in the market, not to necessarily understand what's causing the movement.

In fact, often the more you know as a trader, the worse off you can be. Because when you know too much, you can start telling yourself stories. And when you start believing your stories you can get stuck in bad trades. The only story you pay attention to is the price and volume action.

Another thing I didn't understand was the movement in AMG today. And wow, my timing was also awful in this stock. Basically, it was spiking up and down a point at the time as you can see on the 5-minute graph below.



I really got sucked into him today and made bad trades over and over. All of them were on the short side. The stock was just choppy today and I shouldn't have been trading it. I think I was watching it because it's my best stock on the month. However, I need to remember that the past is gone forever. Just because I made money in him a week ago means nothing about my ability to make money in him today, or tomorrow.

Anyway, the futures are down a bit again overnight. FXY is trading $86... it doesn't look like we're close to going down just yet. However, I'd expect some type of little rally attempt soon.

Here's the stats:
P&L, $2509
Best, UBB, $1131
Worst, AMG, -$998

shares traded, 39,600
27 stocks traded, 20 winners, 7 losers
193 trades