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Just a quick post here. May 24th this year mark the end of my trading the broad range market to trading just options. Since the beginning of the year, the return has been incredible and that still continues to my options trading in which at one time reach 60%+ in just under two months. However, the perfect storm came very quick and almost my entire profit perished.

I’ve been trading options since last year but since my sole focus on options trading beginning May 24th, the market only returns at about -1.27% for Dow Jones, -3.58% for S&P500, -4.73% for Russel 2000, and +0.71% for NASDAQ while my personal portfolio (exclusively options) although got hit and suffers a very large profit draw down, can still ended up a little over +14% (I use the data from May 24th till August 9th, Friday’s trading session is exempted because we haven’t seen the close at the time of this writing)

Considering the risk involved on trading options and the kind of strategy I used, that return is not stellar and can be viewed as a disappointment. My trading strategy use options solely as the substitute of stock. With options, I can leverage my position so when the stock moved to the same direction as my position, I can make a killing. But the risk is that when the stock moved against your position, the risk will be amplified several times compared to if you just bought the stock. And with this “perfect storm”, that directional strategy proven to be almost useless (because as you can see the chart above, the market whipsawing to a different direction almost each day).

So I’ve decided to take a break from trading for a while at least until mid-September because I have a trip scheduled early Sept. In the mean time, I’m going to enhance my trading strategy (well, not the strategy per se, it’s more the stock scan, entry, and exit) and clean up this blog (there’s a new design on the way by Jauhari for this site). Less time for trading meaning more time for me to write on this blog (including the experience I gained from my -almost- 3 years of trading). See you on the next post!

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My GOD! A quite hefty sum of potential profit got lost last night and that made me learn a lesson. All this long I hesitate on adjusting the trailing stop for positions that I held, mostly because most of my trading friends in options doesn’t really employ cut-loss or trailing stop because they always claim that we can easily repair the position once the market turn its back on us. To add to that fact, I got “jumbled” in Apple’s false news fiasco last month that made my trailing stop got executed prematurely.

That premise might be true to prevent us from getting out of the trade early but in the case of a very volatile stock (mostly NASDAQ’s stock) such as AAPL in the last two months, trailing stop is a MUST. My portfolio went from 30%+ profit (in three weeks yay!) to only 10%+ profit (that 20% difference of profit got lost in 1 night. Boo!). Just a quick reminder to my self, never ever forgot or hesitate to set my trailing stop once the contract is already running for profit.

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The final day for me in college will be tomorrow. The gruelsome final project that has been going on for 8 full months will be put to an end (read: the final project is actually my final paper, about the usage of neural network in stock market using options data as its data feed).

I have present many seminar materials in the past with larger audience, but this one will be very special (despite the tiny audience — only 2 people, 1 my tutor and 1 is the ‘tester’) and it’s kinda make me nervous. I’m going to need all the prayers (that means from you too dearest reader, hehe).

See you guys tomorrow and godspeed (plus, I’m going to announce the results too!)

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Windows XP on my Macbook crashed again and although I can login, it refused to run any program at all (installed using Bootcamp). Now back to reinstallation (this time using Parallel), let’s hope I can sync with my P990 on Windows via Parallel (because last time I tried, it can’t).

On other note, the finance-related only site is already soft-launched. Will post more details until I got some more post there (currently only 3 post, a rather barren I suppose).

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Okay that may sound harsh considering I get the license and the DVD for free from Adrian but I have to be honest right? At the first glance of lingering under Vista I got the feeling that this is THE operating system to rule them all. In terms of graphic beauty and eye-candy-ness it’s no doubt that it’s more beautiful than the current version of OSX (10.4 — Tiger). Although this is highly subjective matter because I love darker colors than lighter ones (heck, my laptop is black).

But in terms of usefulness, Vista doesn’t offer anything new that can enhance your computing experience. I thought the notification warning will be the same like my ZoneAlarm firewall security warning that popped up once in a while, but Microsoft can find a way to annoy their users every time we click every friggin’ thing!

Gaming

Of course the first thing that I’ll do with my not-so-new rig is to play games (my spec is 2GB DDR RAM, Athlon XP 2600, 7300GT, nothing fancy). I tried Oblivion, Company of Heroes, and Rainbow 6 Las Vegas.

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If this thing is real and happened, it will surely change the landscape of online-business. With Yahoo’s expertise on online market and Microsoft seemingly limitless resources, how can this marriage go wrong (answer: execution!). Let’s see how things unfold.

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Several days ago I wanted to trade-in my 4 months-old Macbook to a brand new Macbook Pro. The seller who happens to be a friend of mine even offered a trade-in facility and a cheap price (even some layaway). However, this struck me (click to enlarge):

It’s an incident that involves my car and some motor bike and safe to say that I don’t have enough money for the trade-in (minor dent to my car, major dent to the other party). I’m very pissed of but however, I realized maybe this is just a warning to be less shopping-addict (I’m addicted to new and shiny gadgets! — alas, most of the time my wallet is screaming for mercy). Probably this is a warning to hold my self not to buy stuffs that’s not urgently required, in fact how much graphic power does a trading station need anyway?

In part, I also relieved actually to cancel the Trade-in because the rumors are swirling around that Mac might release a new model with Back-LED LCD instead of conventional LCD, meaning less power consumption and lighter weight. With Intel Core Pro line on the horizon, it’s also a wise decision to hold the purchase. For Noto, thanks for the offer, I might not need it now (don’t have enough money anyway — and I don’t like to be in debt), but I’ll surely buy future Mac stuffs from you (how about if we start with APP and LCD replacement? Heheh…)

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Adinoto pinged me tonight about a deal he has on Macbook pro. It’s a barter between my current Macbook with a new Macbook pro in addition to some cash and I think it’s a very good deal. The problem is I’m 60% sure that Apple will update the specification this June (usually they bump up the speed with the same price). And with the graphic card that a Macbook Pro has (ATi Radeon Mobile X1600) which is already dated, financially I can get a much cheaper laptop with the same spec.

The second reason that I’m still pending the decision is that I’m not sure that I’m going to use the graphic card that much since I was just doing some pretty regular stuffs without a hard-core need of a dedicated graphic card (read: a built-in GMA 950 is just good enough for me) — hence not justifying a hefty price tag.

However on the pro-buy side, the finishing of Macbook Pro is astounding. I haven’t seen a finishing for a laptop  better than a Macbook pro, even for fashion-segmented Asus (that has leather as its casing — a very bad design choice, it traps the heat) seemed pale compared to Macbook Pro. With the back-lighted keyboard that is sensitive to light (self-adjusting to the brightness level of the room), it’s probably the best designed notebook ever.

On one hand it’s a good deal on a great designed notebook, on the other hand there’s a chance for update (around June probably, coincide with WWDC) and the graphic processing power might not used too often. What do you think?

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Just a little clarification for those of you who already have my trading history, please do not misinterpret my trading size with my trading account. I’m a trader so it’s natural that I trade A LOT of money during that three month period. But that big numbers don’t mean that I have a big trading account, honestly my trading account is still quite small and I’m trying to grow it onwards. Just wish me luck ;-)

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Well I’m officially 4 months into using Apple on daily basis now. There’s quite a funny thing here, I am using a MacBook from Apple but I often boot to Windows XP to get the job done. At first I didn’t notice this trend until a friend of mine show me that on average I spend more time on Windows XP rather than on a MacOS X. Not that the OS isn’t good for what I do, it’s just not right. So I decided to use one day exclusively with MacOS X and not booting to XP via Bootcamp.

For a background, what I do with the laptop is an everyday job activity. I write stuffs using the word processors, sometimes I create presentation, most of the time I’m keeping my trading journal on a spreadsheet and last but not the least, I swing trade stock markets and options (and of course also browsing the net — duh what else?). So here’s my one-day-exclusive-mac-os-x-only experience after the jump.

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