My dumb emotions

Today I lost 1.41% and I got all worked up about it. What's wrong with me? I know better.

I'm experimenting with using volatility stops with my trades and so far I'm liking it. It really helps with the decision making and helps me keep a majority of my profits. If I continue to use it, I'll give everybody the details.

You can find several short interviews with popular stock bloggers here. Pradeep at Stockbee is the latest. Interesting stuff.

I exited two positions today--NOV and FTI. Both were good trades that took over a month to be really successful.

Here's another guy that shares his returns with his readers. I love to compare different strategies and different traders to see how they do in different markets. I wish more bloggers would post their results on a weekly basis. Maybe I'm too competitive.

I'm beating the pants off of Stock Superstars and The Prudent Speculator. Yep, I guess I am too competitive.

Thanks for those of you who gave their two cents about using margin. I'm leaning toward avoiding it. It doesn't seem to be as widely used as I thought.

My friend Sean continues to hold on to IESV.OB. This is a good example of a stock that "can't get any lower". He bought it at 5.5 cents. It touched 3 cents today. That doesn't seem like much of a drop, but that's about a 50% decline.

The last time I bought an OTC (over the counter or penny) stock it went up over 10% after I bought it. I soon realized that it was my purchase that had moved the stock up. It didn't trade another share for 4 hours! Then somebody sold a bunch and I lost like 25%. What an idiot, I was.