Damn Mexico And It's Homebuilders...

I had a great morning today. I was up a couple grand by 10:00am.

Then, at 10:00am, feeling confident, I short 1200 shares of HXM. This was right before the stock spiked up 80 cents on like 400 shares or something ridiculous like that... anyway, that kind of killed me.



I hear you out there saying something snarky like, "Well, duh! That's what he gets for trading thin stocks," and to that I'll say, "You have a point, but that doesn't mean your wife is being faithful." Think about it...

Anyway, so between HXM and a bunch of other trades that I shouldn't have made, I found myself up $150 by 10:30. Making money and then giving it all back is maybe worse than just losing from the beginning. It's a tough call though. Either way it just sucks.

The good news is that I didn't freak out too much. I still felt good about my morning trades (shorts in RDN, MTG, CNH, DSL) so I wasn't completely broken. I stepped away for awhile.

I came back and noticed that RDN was having trouble regaining the $26 price level.



So I got good and short around $25.70. As you can see from looking at the graph, this was a good idea. Of course, I managed to mess it up a bit since I covered the fat part of my position by $25. I let a measly 200 shares run down below $24.50. Ah, patience... I need some more of it.

Anyway, this brought me back to a respectable level on my day and so I decided to call it quits and check for surf (there was none... things have gone flat).

So on the way back from the beach I sat with my surfing buddy and had a frozen drink while the drunk proprietor of the establishment told us about his coming fame.

"I'm gonna be in a book... that's the author right there!" He slurred, pointing to a balding man.

He continued, spitting while he spoke, "I'm not going to read the book until it's published though. He gave me an advanced copy, but it's bad luck to read unpublished books. Anyway, I live in the Caribbean."

And with that, he stumbled away down the bar to hurl non-sequiturs at other patrons.

Here's the stats:

P&L, $1348
Best, RDN, $1026
Worst, HXM, -$734

54,600 shares traded.
21 stocks traded, 12 winners, 9 losers.
193 trades.