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A few trades and the psychological fallout

Yesterday I put on two new trades and before I could even make the time to post them I had already closed them out. The first was I sold May $17 puts on (BAC). I was tentatively looking for an entry point at $18 to write covered calls, but when it hit $18 yesterday I liked the price of the $17 puts at .38. I was more than willing to own at $16.62. So I sold 10 contracts, then this morning they are trading at .19 so I'm thinking I lock in 50% of the max gain in 24 hours with more than 4 weeks left until expiration. Though the original intention was to hopefully watch them expire worthless, once gain I changed my mind. But then shortly after I'm already questioning myself as to if I liked it when the stock was at $18, shouldn't I like it even better when it's at $18.50 and moved in my favor? I feel like having a plan doesn't mean anything if I'm going to over ride it 24 hours later.

I also did the (POT) put spread sale that I saw on the IWO market primer. I actually put it on myself Monday morning before he sent out an alert. Now here is where I go off the tracks again. So I can make a case that when you can take 50% of the max gain in one day and take off 100% of the risk that kind of makes sense, or at least I'm comfortable with that. But on this trade I only make about 40% of the max gain but I still took it off, not because of the percentages, but because the green box on my screen was flashing an unrealized gain of $300 and I wanted to lock it in. Here is where things get even crazier. One of the reasons I wanted to take both these trades off the books was because they added up to close to $500 and I knew I was going to have a dentist bill for about $500 today to get some fillings done.

This is just insane, complete mental masturbation accounting. The psychological aspect of what I do makes no sense to me. I don't know how I get passed the point of having a plan or a risk management thesis if I'm the one left to actually implement it. The actual fill prices of the POT trade only netted me $275 and not $300. When this happened I felt like I wish I had left the trade on. So I'm happy with a few booked trades with profits of about $450, but clearly there is still no method to my madness and there is a lot of work to be done.

Here is another area I need to address. Both of these trades today happened because I logged on during the day to see what was going on, I tend to do this more often when I have a trade on than when I have nothing on. Had I been busy today or not able to check, I wouldn't have cared. I looked at the closing prices yesterday and its not like I told myself that if if the stocks move in my favor a little bit today I'm going to close these out, but that's exactly what played out. I can make a counter argument that if I don't have time to fool around and look for opportunities sometimes, most of these trades wouldn't even happen in the first place. I think ideally I need to get to a place where I'm busy full time during market hours but make time each night to check in and make decisions when the markets are closed. I'm struggling to find a system of overall portfolio management and its frustrating me a bit.

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