Sunday, November 28, 2010

TRADE LIST

At the top right you will find a link to November/December Trade List. I just added 16 Inverse ETFs. Tomorrow throughout the day, I'll be adding more trades that are not ETF based, approximately another 15. Be careful of correlation with these trades, I've tried to cover several different areas that all have nice 3C and technical patterns. I usually enter limit trades whenever they trigger, which is why I encourage you to put the watchlist limit $ on an alert system like Telechart provides or www.FreeStockcharts.com I usually will use my stop out level only at the close ( a few minutes before the close, not intraday unless something gets too far out of control).

As seems to be the pattern, this week's FX market saw the Euro gap up and within an hour and a half, it has come back down to lose the entire gap.

I'm a bit suspicious of all the afterhours activity last Friday, it feels like something big is coming down and there may be some traps along the way. It is unusual for the big players to show their hand unless there is something that has changed radically.

Back to the list, entries, stocks and stops are all just my take, you have to make them your own according to your risk management and style, but I like all of them and will add more. Remember that you lose the ability to use profits on inverse short ETF's unlike real shorts where you can re-invest part of the profits-it's just a function of long vs short and these inverse ETFs are actually long positions, but give you short exposure. All of them are leveraged. I prefer to maximize profits with leveraged positions and mitigate losses with risk management, but there are less leveraged or no leverage options for those of you not comfortable with the leverage these trades provide.

If you have questions, feel free to email me any time.

We have a lot on the world stage right now and not much of it looks as if it will provide bullish surprises, in fact the exact opposite, but I would not swing for the fences just yet and make sure all trades fall within reasonable risk management. I prefer never to let a losing trade take more then 1-2% of my total portfolio. If you haven't already, please read my risk management article linked at the top right of the site.

Have a great week.

3 comments:

JC said...

This is a good information on silver:

http://news.silverseek.com/SilverSeek/1290625106.php

Anonymous said...

Brandt,
I've read many times that leveraged ETF's should only be held for a day to a max of 1 week due to daily rebalancing. Trend can be in your direction but you can still lose money.

Please comment.

Brandt said...

ETFs have seen a lot of controversy/lawsuits. It is true that they are meant to reproduce a 1-day return. In a choppy market with high volatility, the compounding in these ETFs can lead to losses when they have barely moved. I've done fairly well with them when treated as a swing trade, if they trend then that's fine (that's how I treat most trades anyway). I personally like them for the big picture exposure to an industry, but I wouldn't use them exclusively. While what you say above is true, I've traded them for years on a swing basis-unless they trend well, and haven't experienced any major problems, I've read about the problems a lot more then I've seen them. Like I said though, I like to just use them for the leverage and the broad exposure rather then trying to find the right stock in the group, which has it's own problems with specific stock news, earnings, etc. I also like them to get quick exposure to a fast turn in the market. After that, as the industry group starts to trend, I have a better idea of which stocks in the group I may want to replace them with, especially in a short situation as being short offers advantages you can't get being long, even in an inverse ETF.