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Strategies & Market Trends : Tech Stock Options -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Patrick Slevin who wrote (44127)	5/30/1998 8:01:00 PM
From: dennis michael patterson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 58727

Gene Inger: I get his letter and he has been WRONG on the market all year. He was on CNBC in January and said that after mid-February it was all downhill. WRONG! He is predicting Armageddon, and I am leary.

To: Patrick Slevin who wrote (44127)	5/30/1998 8:41:00 PM
From: ViperChick Secret Agent 006.9	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 58727

here is a post about sharp spikes like last Friday's sell off... btw, for those of you that dont know..the futures sold off around -4 after the market closed.... so we can be up around 4 and we will be even of course remember that sell off was reflected in the index options because they were trading during the sell off +James F. Hopkins (19518 ) From: +Temple Williams Saturday, May 30 1998 2:24PM ET Reply # of 19524 I entered a "position" trade on Friday (as opposed to a daytrade) ... a "sell" of the S&P Futures (the Spoos) at 1:42 p.m. @1098.60 ... and I planned to hold it over the weekend. I changed my mind and have been asked "Why?" by a lot of the people who watch my trading at skansearch.com .... after all, they reasoned, my Voodoo Wave stuff indicated that the market would go lower. Why close out a potentially powerful position trade? The answer lies in my belief that, often, Friday's closes aren't Happy Hour ... they're Whacky Hour ... crazy, nutty, totally unpredictable. At first, I was willing to hold, although I tightened my stop (from the usual 4 full Spoos points to just 2 handles), because I thought they might upcrash it into the close. But when it started to spike sharply lower, one of my trading "rules" stepped in. I will almost always sell a strong spike going in my favor, because, by definition, a spike is a market overreaction. There is often a bounceback (in this case, perhaps a nice gap higher on Monday?). The bounceback usually offers a good re-entry ... at a much more favorable position price. That's why I closed the position with a tight, trailing stop that moved from 2-handles at 3:45 p.m. to 1-handle at 3:55 p.m. I was stopped out @1093.20 the Spoos. Tightening stops like that is an effective exit strategy that can put a lot of extra bucks in your trading account. There have been some spectacular exceptions to this strategy, of course. I remember an interesting Friday in October of 1987. The Monday that followed has become quite famous. You know the Crash I'm talking about.