DRAT! Electronic Arts (ERTS) jumped today.

That isn't the problem... actually there is no real problem here.

I had a position in ERTS, long, and I have gotten rather lax in checking the pre-market activity on my longer term holdings. I set a target exit and just let it ride.

Upon checking into my portfolio (I keep a tracking portfolio on a free charting site for quick reference as I don't need to log in to look at it) I noted that ERTS had a 15% jump.

DRAT!

I had a much lower target set and, had I been checking the pre-market, I most likely would have either raised my target or cancelled my order and set a VTSO after the open. I did get 15 cents over my target in both entries at least ($1.67 and $1.15)

Based on my entries I saw 5.8% and 8.5% returns... but I have held these since October last year. Compared to my 10 day, 2.5% trade in gold last week that's poor. But, a planned gain is a planned gain.

I am still waiting a setup to go long on a gold trade using IAU as a low priced proxy for gold. It doesn't track as well as I would like but overall I am expecting the trade to span at least a week, so a little off should be no big deal. This is actually a breakout move to the upside and I am using a stop limit entry to buy. Due to the tracking error I need to monitor the entry and probably manually enter it. Although if the price of gold gets close enough to the target entry I can estimate the correlated IAU price pretty close and enter an order at that point.

The variance is just not working out to be able to set this one on autopilot.

Jeff.