Monday, July 14, 2008

Must resist . . .

When I saw the premarket numbers, I must admit I was chomping at the bit.

From Reminiscences of a Stock Operator:
"And right here let me say one thing: After spending many years in Wall Street and after making and losing millions of dollars I want to tell you this: It never was my thinking that made the big money for me. It always was my sitting. Got that? My sitting tight!"

I haven't got the skill of sitting tight quite down yet. If I had I'd probably be up 20% for the year. But we all need to be able to adapt to a changing market and be able to accept the fact that it has changed for now. It will pass, but right now doesn't seem to be the time to be aggressive.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Scott,
I am an avid reader of your blog. As much as you don't think so, you do provide a wealth of knowledge on it. I am curious, what do you do for a living?

Scott said...

Anonymous,

I am a family teacher--which means I live with my wife, two kids--and 8 teenage girls who come from all sorts of backgrounds. We teach them life skills so they can get back on their feet and reunite with their families. We've been doing this for 11 years. I usually get a few hours each day (while the girls are at school) to totally screw up my trading account.

Anonymous said...

This is slightly off topic, but here is a screening scenario that always drives me nuts. A stock I held Friday morning (APWR) was no longer passing my screen since its Zacks rank fell to one. I sold it Friday afternoon and thought good about it since the stock had run up a bit last week. Saturday morning I reran my screens and APWR was back to having a rank of one. I repurchased it Monday, but I'm always annoyed when that happens.

StockKevin said...

Scott,

When did we miss the last boarding ship to enter the market?

Scott said...

Kevin,

I tried to answer your question with my latest post.

Scott said...

Anonymous,

Sometimes the Zacks rank is a bit flaky like that. I generally just used the rank on Monday morning and ignored it until the next week.