Stats given cover closed trades for the 29th October - 4th November
My total realized loss from the past week is -1.86% Overall the portfolio is down 5.70% from last week
Profitable trades closed: 27
Unprofitable trades closed: 12
Most traded instrument: $AMD (11 Trades)
This week I have began looking into my trading results in more depth in an effort to stop the rot on my portfolio, with mixed results. One thing that was abundantly clear from both the previous couple of weeks, and this weeks update is my poor management of SL’s as stocks I believe in move deeper into the red. FSLR, SNAP and AMD SL’s all hit at what I knew were very bad prices, even in the short-medium term. This is something I touched on a little during last week’s update, but it is clear that I require a solid routine for checking SL’s across my portfolio on a regular basis, perhaps 3 times daily However, it’s not all bad news. After freeing up funds last week and early this week I experimented more with day-trading using some leverage and the results so far have been very encouraging. Of the 27 day trades (which I count as anything under 72 hours long) this week, 22 were profitable, 5 were unprofitable. There were a couple extra that were just over 72 hours which were effectively day trades as well which were also green. Overall I was up a small amount on my day trading, around 0.15% of the total portfolio value. This sounds low, but is pretty good given that I was only using around 10% of the portfolio’s total value to execute these trades. With compounding interest the same result each week would result in almost 1% profit per month. By increasing from 10% of funds dedicated to day-trading, to 20% that could be 2%. Obviously there is still not enough data for me to be sure about this, but it looks promising and importantly, the day trading also leaves me in a much stronger position for “buy the dip” opportunities should the market move against my long-term positions. I will continue to experiment with this, cautious not to try and force trades over the next couple of weeks, but I suspect it will lead to a decision to try and free up additional funds and increase my day-trading
$ATVI ‘s biggest event of the year took place over the weekend. Blizzcon is an annual event run by Blizzard where they show off their latest games & updates, host finals for some of their major esports tournaments, and announce upcoming titles. This time, the big finale for the event was the announcement of Diablo Immortal - A mobile game set in the Diablo universe, in partnership with $NTES.CH. At an event attended by hardcore Blizzard fans, most of whom consume their content on PC, this did not go down well. Several clips of the audience reaction went viral on social media, with one guest asking “Is this an out of season April fools joke?”. Another question about if the game would ever come to PC in the future lead to the first time Blizzard has ever been booed by the audience at it’s own event. Although in the short term this could hurt the company, there is no denying that Diablo Immortal could in fact be a huge success on mobile, especially in asian markets. Let’s also not forget that although on the surface this is bad news, Blizzards announcement of Diablo is the first piece of gaming news to be picked up across all of gaming media just a week after one of the most successful game launches ever in $TTWO ‘s Red Dead Redemption 2. All publicity is good publicity? As of writing this, the stock sits around the lowest levels of 2018, a nice long-term buy perhaps? Bitcoin Cash has set a date for their upcoming hard-fork to address the issues surrounding the Emergency Difficulty Adjustment for mining. For those unaware, when $BCH first forked from Bitcoin, one of the changes to the code allowed the mining algorithm to adjust down much more rapidly to ensure miners would continue to mine it rather than switching to Bitcoin. Effectively it was a defensive measure put in place to keep the mining environment stable. Unfortunately this had a few side-effects. Since BCH is now well established this piece of code will be removed. Many crypto investors have invested heavily in BCH ahead of the fork, I assume because they believe each chain could continue forward and wish to hold both coins. In reality I suspect the original chain will die and the price will normalise again. Although a pump and dump is inevitable I have decided not to trade it, eToro is usually one of the slower platforms to re-enable trading after a fork, so the potential to be caught with some heavy bags is high. Not only this, but the different camps within the BCH community have grown more polarized. This fork could result in a 3-way chain split, with Bitcoin ABC, Bitcoin Satoshi’s Vision and Bitcoin Cash. So far no major exchanges have offered support to these new cryptos, but if a handful do announce support, it could further fragment the community, affecting the price of BCH very negatively in the aftermath
$SPOT and $SEDG both reported earnings this week.
For $SPOT there were a few concerns as the company again struggled to hit revenue forecasts. User growth was still good, and personally I agree with Spotify’s heavy focus on discovery and building out the artist side of their market to help small artists establish themselves on the platform $SEDG was a more interesting call. Another strong earnings, although many analysts were expressing some concern over the move into batteries. It was also interesting to hear them again referring to the China situation as a reason for the increased growing pains they suffer. They are now working to increase operations outside China, but it feels a little late now after over a year of pains. The numbers speak for themselves though, Solar Edge is continuing to deliver, and although it may struggle to establish itself and potentially cost a lot of money, the UPS and Battery side to the company feels like a necessity when looking at the overall direction of solar, both residential and commercial as more and more developments want an all-in-one solution
Cryptos
$EOS
1 trade for 0.19% profit. Freeing up more funds for defensive trading
Stocks $AMD
10 profits, 1 loss. The profits range from 0.8% to 2.89%. The loss at the beginning of the week was -59.17%, the -59% trade which closed on SL at the start of the week meant that regardless of my remaining strong day-trading I still closed out the week down on my AMD trades
$SQ
1 profit of 4.92%, another strong day trade, this time over a 24 hour period
$SNAP
4 shorts. Three profits of 12.3%, 0.33%, and 6.44% followed by a loss of -50%. Again an example of my poor SL management. If the position were still open it would now be down by around 40%
$NSDQ100
7 profits of between 0.14% and 4.41%. 2 losses of -11.03% & -9.02%. My active trading of the Nasdaq overall left me slightly worse than break even after allowing the two losing positions to run a little too far, although a reasonable price to pay for exposure to the market as a shorting hedge
$ETSY
More day trading, with 3 positions closed at 4.21%, 1.44% & 1.79% profit. ETSY earnings are also due later this week
$FB
1 small short position closed at a loss of -6.75%
$GER30
1 short closed at a loss of -2.86% A day-trade that moved the wrong way closed for an acceptable small loss
$TWTR
1 buy closed at -26.66%, followed by a short closed at 2.54% profit. Again I see the closing of the -26.66% as a form of loss protection after their strong performance this past week
$SPX500
1 brief short for 1.64% profit
$GOOG
1 loss of -18.17%, This was a long position taken ahead of Google earnings, which despite strong financials fell heavily after the market opened
$TSLA
1 position closed at -3.14%, In hindsight I could perhaps have held onto this position, but amidst a very weak market open on Monday I decided to hold off a little longer before building some long-term exposure here
$AMZN
1 loss of -23.51% More protective trading early in the week when the market looked like it could fall further
$QCOM
1 loss of -17.60%, like Amazon, this position was closed to free up funds during the major market move below the 200MA on the daily charts for the Nasdaq
$FSLR
1 loss of -51.31% Another poorly managed SL
Looking Forward
As mentioned, I will continue to work on a strategy for handling SL’s and continue testing my day-trading ability. My goal is to have the remainder of November without any major closes in red. These are clearly the trades that have hurt my performance most, and many of them were avoidable We also have another big week of earnings, with $TTWO $ETSY $DIS $ATVI and $QCOM reporting. Finally, $AMD are hosting the “Horizon” event in San Francisco on Tuesday. Last time they hosted this event it was to unveil their Ryzen CPUs. My belief is that this is the launch of the new 7nm GPU that’s been long awaited. I expect this to have a potentially substantial effect on stock price, the event was advertised to investors on the AMD Investor Relations page and even the last earnings call