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Strategies & Market Trends : Z PORTFOLIO -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Kelvin Taylor who wrote (7446)	5/2/2002 10:37:24 PM
From: DanZ	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 11568

Kelvin, I'm glad that we agree that day trades shouldn't be posted as portfolio trades. If people have the time and desire to post their day trades, they can do so on the other thread. I'm all for sharing ideas, including day trades. My situation just doesn't allow me to do it at this time. I disagree that stock prices won't or can't move up until it becomes evident that the economy is recovering. The stock market anticipates changes in economic conditions. Historic analysis indicates that the stock market leads the economy by about six months. I read that somewhere but please don't ask for a citation because I don't know where it is. It sounds about right, however. By the time the economic recovery is evident, the stock market will already have recovered. How much, nobody knows, but the point is, the market WILL bottom and recover well before the actual data supporting it is released. I think that you are being too critical of our results this year. Of course, it would be better to be up 13% instead of down 13%, but our results are consistent with the Nasdaq. We have a gain of $52,445 on closed positions, so I'm not sure where you come up with "very few winner positions". We do have a $198,000 loss on open positions, but there's no way to tell if we would have lost that amount on new positions even if we had sold today's open positions earlier. It is hard to make money on long positions when the market gets hammered. It doesn't matter what stocks you are in. Would it have mattered if we lost $198,000 on the stocks we are holding today or other stocks? Like I said earlier, most of our losses are concentrated in two or three stocks out of all the positions we have traded this year. I compared the closing prices of the stocks that we already sold to today's prices. Clearly we would have been worse off holding all those positions, but it isn't a fair analysis because there's no way that we could have held all those positions at the same time. We simply didn't have enough cash. We have closed 154 positions so far this year, and traded over $3 million worth of securities. In many cases we bought and sold the same security over and over again. Also, the gain on short positions would be higher today had they been held. There were too many symbols to update manually, so I wrote a Visual Basic program to download today's quotes from Yahoo's website for our closed positions. I added four new columns to the spreadsheet: Close 5/2/02, G/L to 5/2/02, % to 5/2/02, and G/L excluding short sales. I will post the detailed spreadsheet in the next post, but I'm not sure what anyone will get out of it. Here's a summary: If our closed long positions were held until today, we would have lost an additional $455,277. If our closed short positions were held until today, we would have gained an additional $110,578. If we had held all long and short positions until today, we would have lost an additional $344,699. Like I said, this data is meaningless because it would not have been possible to hold all these positions until today. It only demonstrates that most stocks that we already sold are lower today. However, in some cases we traded the same stock over and over again for a profit each and every time even though the price today is lower than where it was sold. So what does that tell you other than we made the right decision to sell it? It doesn't say anything about where we would have been had we sold all the positions that are open today. Most likely if we had sold them, we would have bought something else and lost money and wouldn't be any better off than we are today. I suspect that we would have been better off only if we had sold everything and went to cash, or had more short positions.