Big misstakes

Today i made serveral big misstakes. To start I was not positioned well going into the open because i had some call options from the Friday before. It was not a misstake to have these calls, as these were small reasonable bets given the previous week's action. The first misstake was to sell these immediately upon the open. I should not have done anything right away as given the size of the gap down the odds were that we would rally after the open. Frankly Mike Swanson called this perfectly last night here.

http://www.wallstreetwindow.com/content/node/5677

Next i tried to go short via some puts. This just obviously was chasing the markets, which is always bad. In my defence i was thinking i would not be able to get in on the short side if i did not move. I was concerned we would hit a circuit breaker. But in hindsight this was just not the right thing to do.

The one good thing about all this is that from the peak of 14000 or so on the DOW Industrials i have been able to make money and have dodged the entire decline. So while i took a 4% loss today i have dodged a larger 15% decline i would have taken if i had been blindly long and strong.
I also am hopefully now positioned a little better to deal with the potential snap back rally we should have.

Right now the shorts might be really annoyed if they did not take their profits yet. I know i would be. This opens the possibility of a short sharp, although temporary, rally from here.
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