Today we got a great rally. It always comes a little later than you want or need if you are positioned long.
I have been in the middle of a trade (long) the last week. What started out as a nibble, turned into a full stomach by Monday at the close.
Today is the first day I am actually looking at my account since last week because I don’t like staring at my P&L while I am scaling into a trade.
So how is the trade going?
I made one mistake that will null everything I got right.
I started into Apple way too early (my average price on this trade is now $165)
By the time the panic trade in the Nasdaq and S&P looked good enough to pile in on Friday and this Monday, I was just too big in Apple. I was buying Apple the last month not expecting that the whole market would follow it into meltdown.
I was also a few days early in Facebook. I started buying at $133 when they were sued last week. The stock fell to $122. Today it is looking like I may get a win as it crosses back above $133 and I pare it down.
I did not buy anything this morning but by the close I am up up a bit on the Nasdaq I started buying last week.
If we rally a week or two from here it’s a good trade. If Apple can jack the market with an announcement or two, I may be able to justify the aggravation.
If we start heading back down tomorrow, I will backpedal and stay with what I got myself into, bringing down my average prices from these levels.
All in all, it has not been worth my aggravation and reinforces why I trend follow in the first place.
My cash position was high headed into this meltdown because I was getting stopped out the last few months. If you follow along on Twitter in 2018 I went from BTFD Lindzon to STFR Lindzon to Bear Market Lindzon to Nibbling Lindzon. If we rally a few more weeks it will be Happy Lindzon…happy to get out alive and wait until the next big uptrends resume.
Other than QQQ (Nasdaq 100), I am left with just 9 stock positions right now – Apple, Nike, Google, Amazon, Twilio, Etsy, Visa, Tencent and Shopify. Only Shopify, Twilio and Etsy are really still in uptrends… the rest are my 8 to 80 stocks that I have owned for years and look to add on 20 plus percent pullbacks (which explains my Apple problems).
I feel like I will get stopped out of Shopify, Etsy and Google next if this correction/bear market resumes. I think it will.
As a point of reference, In September, I owned 21 different stocks. On Stocktwits I have tried to be more granular as this was developing the last few weeks.
If I were to guess, I would say this stock market will not be kind to my style of trend investing for a while.
The BTFD era was a blast…now I am rooting for an end to this new era of STFR (selling the f*@king rips).
Hope this helps.
PS – I have not seen any slowdown in the seed markets. This selloff in public markets was so fast and relentless, that it may take time for the nervousness to creep down the pipe. We continue to see great founders and companies and are on the same pace of investing as we have been the last 10 years at Social Leverage. Our fast growing companies have had great 2018’s raising capital. As for a bear market in seed stage investing….I am all for seed stage prices coming down because prices/valuations have been too high for a few years.