Great Trades

Not including the February 3 intraday long for 200+ Dow points, and not including the short gold hedge from the exact peak day, our trading model's performance based on a hypothetical $10,000 account and our blog posts, updated from the February performance post, shows growth to $14,230, or 42.3%, vs. the S&P 500's -11.7% return on the year so far. Here are the March trades:

Speculative traders, using a separate hypothetical $10,000 account for calculation, would have made an additional 39.1%, including 16.4% through February:




Commissions are not included in the above calculations, nor is interest credited for cash or interest charged on any margin. Closing prices were used for end of day trades, and approximate intraday prices for intraday posts.

While definitely not a perfect month, we were able to cover our heavily leveraged shorts and get heavily leveraged long right near the early March low. Unfortunately, we sold out of our longs and got short too soon during the rally, leaving a lot of gains on the table on very well-selected longs that moved up significantly more later in the month (e.g., HIG, BAC, PTV, financials). For any future bear market rallies off an extremely oversold level, we'll try to be more patient with longs, perhaps holding on to such individual stocks and hedging with index shorts at overbought levels.

Open Positions: Short 20% S&P 500, short 30% financials, speculative traders short another 20% S&P 500, short another 40% financials.