What I Learned

Here’s what I learned this week. I kept stocks that were no longer on the Zweig screen because they were rated 1 or 2 on Zacks. My thinking was that the ZZ screen was pretty close on a monthly basis to the weekly rebalancing so I shouldn’t be too quick to drop a stock. This thinking was good as GES and CRDN took off on Monday. However, my mistake was that I didn’t put tight stops on the stocks and CRDN took a dive which I couldn’t pull the trigger on. It went on to lose Thursday big time. So the idea not to be trigger happy was a good one GES has done well, but I need to put 3% stops on them. I’m not worried about missing out through volatility. The stocks are no longer recommended so as soon as they disappoint, they’re done, but before that I’ll allow them to make me a few more bucks. If I had sold CRDN after it lost 3% and bought ANF I would be up almost $2000 more this week than I was.