Meta-Trader - Best Day Ever

Welcome back Meta-Traders.

It was a wild week in financial markets, full of both the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. I also had my best day ever, but I'll get to that below.

Monday started off banking a nice profit from the sale of Amazon and collecting the full premium on my short call. On the flip side, pharmacy benefit manager SXCI opened the day Monday with a crushing 14-point downside gap on news of the takeover of SXC customer Healthspring by insurer Cigna. I have 200 shares in each account so that was $2,800 times 2 or $5,600 loss. Ouch and how's that for a way to start a Monday morning?

When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade, so I bought 200 shares in each account at about 43.20 on Monday at about 10AM. Normally, I don't like to average down, but that seemed the only way to profit from a bad situation. Within an hour or 2, I was up about $500 per account and feeling better. Unfortunately, the profits started to fade, so I closed the new positions at about 2PM booking a $380 dollar gain in each account which helped to ease the pain.

Tuesday rolled around and I noticed (using my favorite charting tool http://www.tc2000.com) that GLD had a bull-elephant bar on Monday and cleared recent congestion to the upside. Also, someone on CNBC noted that huge quantitative stimulus from the Euro-zone via the EFSF will leave to further commodity inflation. So I picked up 100 shares in each account in anticipation at a possible run at the old highs.

Wednesday rolled around and Amazon had a huge gap down after reporting an earnings miss on Tuesday evening. The stock opened close to $200 a share, and I felt pretty good about having recently sold it at an effective price of $229. Investing in individual stocks can really be a mine field and this was a case in point. But no pain no gain as the big boys like to say.

Thursday rolled around the market completely blew out to the upside, opening with about a 2.4% gap in the S&P 500. What really struck me was the strength in energy shares. Oil Services ETF OIH closed Wednesday at close to 126 and gapped up to 130 on the open and traded as high as 135 on the day! I took advantage of this situation and sold a November 131 call at a limit of $5.60 and got filled late in the morning. This trade turned out to be a bit premature since the fund closed the week close to $135. But just 3 short weeks ago, I was down nearly 3K per account on this position, so I felt grateful to get that money back. Plus with this trade I'll book an easy $560 per account in under 3 weeks time.

Thursday closed the day up almost 3% on the major averages. When I calculated all the gains, I was up in the low 5 figures on the day and had by best day ever! I'm not going to say exactly how much, but it was nearly enough to pay cash for my current wheels which is a 2011 Honda Civic, shown above. Of course, I probably had my worst day ever sometime in the August-September sell off. But it is my blog and i'm allowed to accentuate the the positive.

Friday was a bit of a disappointment as health-case cost containment company HMSY reported earnings that beat estimates, but revenues missed. This shot another hole in my portfolio and was another setback along with SXCI. Stocks sometimes sell off after earnings without a good justification and this is a case in point. So I'll just have to wait for reason to prevail.

Forex robots were a sloppy this week to put it kindly. Nearly everything was down except for scalper Megadroid Live, Atinalla #4 and Neural Network trader Sunqu. That Sunqu account is a thing of beauty, so be sure to check it out.

On the development side, my new FXDD account is created and I'm waiting for the check to clear and funds to become available. I've already mapped out my new systems and accounts allocation for 2012 and I will cover that in a separate post.

Also, I started working on another blog post called "What's Wrong with AT4?" which will delve into the performance of my Atinalla #4 portfolio and try to uncover why its under-performing other AT4 portfolios, even on the same broker. Check back for that, its sure to be learning experience - especially for me!

That's all, enjoy your weekend!