January 15th update

What a day. Two days into the active trading plan and I am stuck again. 1030h and all the stock has done is drop. Boy, do I miss the short selling. I watched as the price of TLM dropped off the bell about 15 cents, jumped back up and has headed down ever since. That would have been a short that I would have taken as the PP and the 200sma were both acting as superb resistance and the quotes were also indicating a selling pressure. I think that I would have rode it right down to $11.35 (from $11.90) as none of the rallies were more than 10 cents...about my general mental stop setting for TLM.

HED, the bear ETF, would head up as a result and looked good for that as well. I am stuck on trying to get some long positions in TLM so I do not pay as close attention to HED. That and it tends to gap a lot. I have a few places where it has jumped 20 cents. Now, with a judicious use of limits I could get in and out of even those, perhaps, but as I said yesterday, I am not familiar enough with these to start jumping in and out of them like a stock yet. Too bad as I missed out on a good $1.00 move already.

Shame.

I heard that there was some bad news for oil sands projects, Apple has CEO issues and Nortel filing for bankruptcy protection...these are all likely a factor and it is reflected in the market. This is why I don't bother much trading on news as the news shows up. I did not know of the news, other than Nortel, until after seeing the results in the prices and indices.

So it looks like I will be sitting on my cash for a while longer. I think it is time to do another scan for stocks to choose from, or perhaps check out some other higher volume ETFs to play off of.

Oh, no charts, just drawa straight line fromthe top left of a page to the bottom right and that is about what it looked like...revesre it for HED. I will keep an eye on it to see if anything materializes but it doesn't feel very good to me.

Knowing when to walk away.

Jeff.