Dropping

THE SKY IS FALLING! THE SKY IS FALLING!!!

What a day! At one point the Dow was down more than 400. In fact, I called the absolute bottom, told everyone in the class to buy calls on the Diamonds, of course I didn't have the guts to pull the trigger and I don't think anyone there did either. Oh well.

Needless to say my buy stops didn't fill this morning. I love using them because they keep me out of days like today but get me in on the momentum up.

Believe it or not, I'm still overall bullish. I think it'll take a couple weeks to shake everything out but check out this 2 year chart of the S&P 500.


Towards the end of the day I realized that it was coming back and testing this trendline. It just happens to be the lows of the two corrections we've seen over the last year. 3 touches will make this a confirmed trendline. This was happening as the VIX hit 2 year high levels.


Many stocks retraced back to some good support levels, maintaining their trends. This is keeping me bullish on the market. I say it looks quite toppy, and I'm not sure how much longer the stock market will ignore the economic conditions we are in. But I've always said it's more important to trade what you see rather than what you think or feel.

As for my positions today, I got stopped out of a few and gave up most of my profit on the others. Earnings on POT and COL were disappointing at best. COL got really exciting for the first hour or so. The options weren't trading at first, not surprising when it went from 71 to 61 and back to 71 in the first 20 mins of trading. When they finally did open the ask was 5 and the bid was 0. Once it settled down I got lucky and closed near the high for the day and broke even.

My AAPL spread is almost at max gain. I tried to exit this morning for a 5 cent debit but hit the wrong contracts and entered a bear put on some different strikes instead. As I unrolled my mistake I picked up $15, that covers all my commissions and then some. How's that for a silver lining?