Originally Posted by petegz28:
Going out on a limb a bit here but I think we have put in a short term bottom. Could very well be a bear market bounce. Resistance on the SPY is around $450ish.
Downtrend is fully intact mind you.
I think we’re pretty close too, within 5% of a bottom.
The bounce we get might only be short term and no where near getting back to all time highs. NASDAQ would need to gain 21% for that. [Reply]
I'm under water on five trades I made selling puts. I ended up buying the stock on all five trades. Put out some call options on two of them today and I have another call that expires this month, and I don't see it getting to the strike price. My Nasdaq stocks have taken a hit as well as one would figure. The biggest part of my investments which are dividend generators are hanging in there but then my 401K has taken a pretty good hit as well. Oh the pain! [Reply]
Originally Posted by Hog's Gone Fishin:
Question: How long would it take to make 201 trades that avg a 3.5% return ?
There's tons of stocks that are volatile enough for a 3.5% return during the coarse of a week if not a day.
For example TSLA just today opened at $897 .If you set a buy order at a 1% discount you could have picked it up at $888 and then set yourself up a standing sell order with a 3.5% swing at $919 and accomplished your goal.
As of right now the TSLA high /Low today is $881-$932 Thats actually a 5.7% swing today.
So my thinking is if you can make 201 trades and AVERAGE 3.5% assuming some will be less and some will be more , it will turn $1000 in to $1,000,000.
This sounds too easy. What am I missing other than stocks don't always go up. LOL
Could this be done in 3 years ?
Interested to hear what others say on this. The one major flaw I see is the short term capital gains tax really hits into your earnings unless you are doing this from a Roth or other tax advantaged account. [Reply]
Originally Posted by Hog's Gone Fishin:
Question: How long would it take to make 201 trades that avg a 3.5% return ?
There's tons of stocks that are volatile enough for a 3.5% return during the coarse of a week if not a day.
For example TSLA just today opened at $897 .If you set a buy order at a 1% discount you could have picked it up at $888 and then set yourself up a standing sell order with a 3.5% swing at $919 and accomplished your goal.
As of right now the TSLA high /Low today is $881-$932 Thats actually a 5.7% swing today.
So my thinking is if you can make 201 trades and AVERAGE 3.5% assuming some will be less and some will be more , it will turn $1000 in to $1,000,000.
This sounds too easy. What am I missing other than stocks don't always go up. LOL
Could this be done in 3 years ?
That sounds kinda sorta like something Rain Man was doing for a while. I think it worked until it didn't. The whole "stocks don't always go up" thing is more than a minor issue, especially if you're focused on volatile stocks that have the potential to tank. [Reply]
Originally Posted by DaFace:
That sounds kinda sorta like something Rain Man was doing for a while. I think it worked until it didn't. The whole "stocks don't always go up" thing is more than a minor issue, especially if you're focused on volatile stocks that have the potential to tank.
Yeah, I started to type it and then had to leave for a meeting.
I had a 2+ year experiment doing something similar. At some point I had two stocks that moved around a bit but were pretty stable, and I theorized that they might move in opposite directions during their meanderings. They were RCL (cruise line) and PSX (oil). So I tried an experiment with them. I put Amount X in one and Amount .2X in the other. Whenever I had a day where I got a 2 percentage point change with the bigger holding outperforming the smaller holding, I would move 80 percent of the money from the bigger one to the smaller one. Then I would wait for the reverse to happen and switch it back.
The result didn't generate profit per se, but it let me build up the number of shares in each stock. In practice, I was selling .8X on a good day, parking it in a stock that had gotten proportionately cheaper, and then buying back the stock when random movements made the cheaper stock more expensive.
I did it for a year with those two stocks and liked what I was seeing, so I wanted to see if I could generalize it. I took a bunch of stocks and randomly paired them, and did the same thing with them.
I did this in two IRA accounts so I didn't have to worry about short-term gains. One is my active IRA that's still getting contributions, and the other is a rollover IRA that I don't contribute more money into.
The rollover was a great experiment because I'm mostly a buy and hold guy, so 95 percent of the activity was this "rocking back and forth" strategy. That made it easier to evaluate results. It was more of a hassle to evaluate in the active account, but still possible.
Here's what I learned. In a relatively stable market, it MIGHT have worked. I think it did. The rollover account was easy to evaluate, and what I saw was that this "rocking" strategy gave me returns that were 3.5 percent over what I would have gotten if I just kept the portfolio constant. The strategy was letting me increase my number of shares at no cost. So that was a big win, and it was clearly attributable to this strategy. The key was to be patient and never sell at a loss, and only make the flips when it was a gain over the previous flip. I invested in stocks that I liked, so I didn't really worry about it if I didn't flip for a while.
It was harder to tell the outcomes with the active IRA since I was adding money during the experiment. But I think the strategy didn't make money in that account, and it was mostly for one reason. At some point I "rocked" money into a couple of industries that were experiencing a sustained decline. Because of that, they kept going down and I was now overweighted in them, and I couldn't rock the money back. That kind of stank. I underperformed in that account and I think it was because of this issue.
Then the shutdown hit and I stopped the strategy because the random variations that I was concentrating on were blown out of the water by big industry-specific changes that were happening for specific reasons. The strategy's not going to work in that market.
I concluded that the strategy works if you're in a stable market that's mostly sideways. It doesn't work if you have a lot of sustained movement that differs by industry (i.e., differentials in stocks are happening for a reason as opposed to just random walks around a price range). That volatile environment has been happening for two years now, so my game has stopped. But if we ever get back to "normal", I might try it again. [Reply]