George,
having lost about 75 grand in Dec, and Jan, I am about the last person to advise you on what to do. However, understanding this, here are some ideas. First of all Do everything possible to whittle away at that margin debt. One thing you can do is sell covered calls on your positions to possibly recupperate some losses. these stocks are volatile and have fairly good premiums on options. you could sell calls against your long positions on rallys, and buy the calls back cheaper on dips, or just let them expire worthless. use the call premiums to either buy puts, which would protect you from more downside and wouldnt cost anything, or use the call premiums to pay down your margin debt.
Realizing of course that if the market turns sharply, your stock could be called away from you thus forcing you to liquidate..
Just a few thoughts.. there is a covered call thread on S.I. that covers this topic. and surely there are many far more experienced people there to get advice from..
But get off margin..stop the bleeding. I personally took my losses, started over with what was left, which wasnt much, and am now daytrading only. I have learned to short, and am up nearly 30% in February. But I will not hold any margin overnight..NONE.. and actually haven't been holding anything overnight..
You can be fairly certain that any significant rally will be sold and we wont go up in a straight line, so use the rallys to sell out of the money calls, if you must hold those positions. You won't miss out on a move up if the market does start moving up..there will be plenty of opportunity to get in and plenty of pullbacks. You may sleep much better knowing that you're not exposed to a jdsu move down to $10 or something. who thought RMBS would be 15. down from 40 in two days..
hope this helps a bit.
rok |
