Yesterday while cleaning up some piles of papers I ran across what was my staple "back of the napkin" type of calculations for trade ideas used to be. This is from March 2009 when I was willing to go nuts on bull call spreads because I thought the world wasn't going to end. This particular idea looks to be a theory that either the world really is going to end, or its not and this level is ridiculous. In the end I ended up going with a bull call spread but its interesting to see my thought process, or lack there of, back then. There were originally about 20 of these pieces of paper and index cards at the time with misc ideas on them. No charts, no mention of IV's (since I had no concept of what that was), no exit point or mention of anything other than the stated risk/reward in dollars. I got lucky with a gut call, but clearly that's all it was, luck. So I'm actually going to keep this around as a reminder of both how far I've come and just how arcane my trading really was in the not so distant past. Had I not bettered myself, it clearly looks to me as if my style of investing/trading in the past was really a time bomb that just never went off.
Many of you have been reading this blog may have noticed that my blogging frequency has increased over the past few weeks as I got short the market. As you can imagine I am down money since getting short the market, this is the time when most people pull away from posting. But my goal is to stay active and involved and show you that trading is not always rainbows and butterflies. It is times like these that the things I have been sharing over the past couple of weeks are so important. You need to trade small relative to your account. I have a decent short position in the market and my portfolios are set up to make some awesome returns if we finally turn lower. But something I would like to point out is that my account is 70% Cash. I learned a long time ago how important it is to live by the rules you preach. Because of my discipline I am able to continue to hold my positions, I have time and capital on my side. I can't stress enough how important it is not to get to big....

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