In order to keep on track for my 2007 goal of reaching a net worth of $470,000 I needed to reach $374,000 this month. It looks like I am north of $376,000 at this point. Other major milestones are exceeding a net worth in non-retirement accounts of $200,000. In Australian Dollar terms I added more than $A20,000 to net worth and sailed past $A 1/4 million in the non-retirement accounts. I made $4525 in short-term trading in the US - a rate of return for the month on capital employed of 19.69%. Yup that's more than 800% on an annual basis, so don't expect me to sustain that :) Overall investment returns were far above market indices. January is usually a month where I do very well.
Full details will be coming in a few days.
5 comments:
Good job Moomin, very good job!
What short term trading did u do? was it just QQQQ
Thanks for the congratulations!
I traded QQQQ and SPY and their futures NQ and ES. Also I did a very good trade on AAPL around the earnings release.
Yesterday I tried GOOG but wasn't successful. The trade will be in February as I bought options before the close (1 Feb $550 call) and they don't actually trade till today. GOOG options collapsed today, even very out of the money ones like the 550.
I'll have more detail later when I do the full monthly report.
PS - there was also some Aussie Dollar trading and maybe other stuff I need to dig out...
I thought about trading myself in futures, but I'm scared for now.
I recently just started investing in commodities, so I guess one step at a time.
Trading NQ and ES is no different than trading QQQQ and SPY except that they allow you much more leverage (10% and 5% down respectively roughly). The key is to only trade as much as you can bear to risk, not what the broker allows you. It is easy to get sucked in using futures and options to taking on too much risk getting scared when the market goes against you, doing something dumb, and losing money. At the moment my total portfolio never has a beta greater than 1 (to the SP500). When short I am only getting down to a beta of -0.2. In the future when I am sure I am consistently profitable I might take it as far as a beta of 2 to -2. But you could trade a beta of 20 in theory if you stuck all your cash down as futures margin.
Forex and other futures are different because they really are 24 hour markets. I still haven't developed a good way to trade forex.
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