re: Bloody few days, especially for me.

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I'm curious to those who are in the buy individual stocks camp vs just buying equity index funds. Are you doing this with your entire retirement portfolio? Is all your money in the market at the same time? What's the max percentage of your portfolio that you would put towards 1 stock?

Also, I wonder how big your portfolios are. Once your portfolio is well into 6 or 7 figures; I just can't imagine buying individual stocks at those amounts. I wouldn't be able to sleep at night.

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If your experience in the financial markets is limited to a personal trading account and watching CNBC, then there is a strong likelihood you should probably stick to index funds (active versus passive, equities versus fixed income is a completely different discussion).

There is absolutely nothing wrong with that, not everybody works professionally in the business and not everybody has the time to devote to learn the ins-and-outs of the market, both operationally and fundamentally. I've worked with traders that have been in the business since the 70's, and almost everyone has lost their arse at one point or another. So even if you are a professional and the financial markets are basically your life, that still doesn't preclude you from getting your fricking face ripped off by the market. Of course the opposite can easily be true, complete amateurs have hit early retirements from concentrated risks. But on average, your standard retail investor that dabbles in individual stock picking, FX, etc. will lose money more often than not.

The old "sell in May and go away" would have actually worked this year... at least for techs, energy, momo stocks and more than a few other sectors. I don't mind being down a few percent when there is an overall downdraft. But I do need to better understand why the technical trading models that I use failed so miserably. Time to analyze what happened, run some back-testing and rejigger, it seems.

My trading accounts took the biggest hits. My investment accounts basically tracked the market +/-, and I'm not wound up about that. But had the technicals worked as intended in the trading accounts, I should have been shorting certain stocks and avoiding most longs across the board. If I had shorted or bought puts/sold calls on several that are on my watchlist (MU, BABA, GPRO, ZAGG, SCTY, etc.), I would easily have been up 10-15% in the past 30 days.

I'm still up for the year in all accounts. But over the past month, I've also given a tremendous amount back to the house by zigging when I should have been zagging.

As an aside, when I first started posting here, I posted a thread where I asked if people determined BEFORE buying a stock if they were in it to trade it or if it was (truly) an investment. A trade that goes bad, but you hold onto it to "get even again", is not an investment. And at least on a trade, dollar cost averaging a TRADE, as it falls from the sky (just to prove that you were right) is a classic trading mistake. And yes, at some point, all of us have done that. I read threads here all the time where people are admitting that they're doing that, without realizing it to themselves. There are some excellent books out there about the psychology of trading. IMO, the more a person can do to take the emotion out and introduce a rules based trading methodology, the better off they'll be... if they're TRADING, not investing.

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A trade that goes bad, but you hold onto it to "get even again", is not an investment. And at least on a trade, dollar cost averaging a TRADE, as it falls from the sky (just to prove that you were right) is a classic trading mistake. And yes, at some point, all of us have done that.

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Agreed. No method will ever compensate for poor risk management.

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what the hell happened in oil midday? Anyone know or have a guess?

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The U.S. government on Tuesday modestly raised its 2015 and 2016 U.S. crude oil production forecasts while lowering its price outlook.
In its short term energy outlook, the U.S. Energy Information Administration raised its 2015 U.S. crude oil production growth forecast to 750,000 barrels per day (bpd) from 720,000 bpd.

Why the hell that made energy stocks go up...I have no clue. It makes no sense to me. But, they all rebounded after that news.

I am thinking about moving all of my 401k to an S&P 500 index fund. I don't like these "35-to gos" very much.

That made me think of a joke John Madden told back in the 80's. It's a joke, so nobody take it as more than that.

John said he walked into the Raiders' locker room one day, and this big lineman was throwing a $100 bill into the toilet. Then he takes his Rolex off and drops it in too. John goes over and asks him what he's doing. The guy said, "I accidentally dropped a quarter in the toilet and I'm making it worth my while to stick my hand in and get it back out."

Yeah, I know. But it's stayed with me as a good dollar cost trading joke for a long time.

Try the veal and don't forget to tip your waitress.

BREAKING NEWS - NYSE halts trading due to Technical Issues. Earlier today United Airlines had to suspend flights due to technical issues, but flights have resumed.

FIT is saving my arse right now.

The rest of my portfolio is a slaughterfest.