Hi Clappy:
I went to the Manning Advanced Trading Seminar at the NY Sheraton. They probably had in excess of 2000 people there that evening. While the seminar was "free", they were pitching their three day seminar for a "limited time discounted offer" (heard that before???) of $2,500.00. No, they don't take food stamps! (I asked). Although I came about 45 minutes late (7:00 to about 10:30 pm which included a 15 minute break to harass the speaker, deal with bathroom issues, etc...
I must say that i was pretty impressed with the intro seminar. While there were a number of things that I did know, there were just as many, if not more thing that I didn't know (well, what do you expect of me). What "scared" me a bit was watching a disgruntaled member of the audience who was complaining that all he was saying was "mickey mouse" and wanted to hear more. Many of us in the audience were embarrased by his outburst for several reasons, one of which was that he thought that the intro seminar was too elementry, while the rest of us, including several stock brokers were impressed with the knowledge disseminated (left a real stain). We were embarrassed that we didn't know as much as we should have.
I came to the realization that I know very little/there is a lot more to learn about technical analysis, trading and investing. When to buy and WHEN TO SELL!!! selling is a sore point. The problem on these threads is that everyone discusses when to jump into a stock/option, but no one discusses when they were going to exit a stock/trade until way after the fact (or fiction as I have seen in reading various threads). Either people here have an unlimited source of investment revenue, or we're not being privy to the entire trading picture. Receiving partial data can kill you in this market. Another problem with some of these threads is when a stock is in the process of going down, whether for valid reasons or the result of "alleged manipulation" by the powers that be, we console ourselves that this is either bogus manipulation (which it may very well be)or that we should ride it through, since it will reverse itself at any moment. How many of us have taken wonderful profitable positions back in march and rode it down into the ground while we took comfort from eachother by consoling one another, fiddling as Rome burns. Whether the reason why a stock went down because of valid or bogus reasons, the effect remains the same! It is a loss of valuation. Experienced disciplined traders are supposed to set a disciple of risk management, something that was lacking in my prior trades. Now it's time to go to school.
BTW here's my holdings:
CREE (and some 03/01 leaps)
BRCM and leaps
JDSU and leaps
100 01/01 INTC 50's leaps
RMBS and leaps (not that many)
NT leaps (courtesy of the recent debacle).
EXTR leaps (same as above).
Sold my qcom leaps, margin call.
Looking to pick up some MYGN.
Thought about picking up some more rmbs leaps during the fire sale yesterday, but I was still dodging a maintinence call.
Anyway, I spent part of the day playing with Qcharts after having quote.com's Livecharts on the fritz for a second day in a row. I "requested" a temporary pass code for qcharts in leiu of the problems that I encountered with livecharts.
Now I'm downloading window on wall street for the ten day demo.
I will now try to become more of a student of T/A (yeah, both the stock version, and the more colloquial form).
Best regards to all,
David |
