LOL!'s Market Timing Newsletter

[papadad111]

correction

We will see 10% a swift correction in January. I can feel it / smell it ! Will bounce along the lows with the euro and oil prices being low til April or May and then slowly climb back.

Oil has yet to see capitulation, but am now long USO @ $20/shr and looking for a short term speculative gain/trade up t around $22/shr by August 2015.

Adding to VXUS on the down days to get international to be 20% of portfolio?

Cash position remains approx 10% and will stay at that level unitl a 10% correction (closing price) is achieved and then add approx 5%to existing positions across the portfolio

 

[FUEGO]

Oil has yet to see capitulation, but am now long USO @ $20/shr and looking for a short term speculative gain/trade up t around $22/shr by August 2015.

I jumped in to oil too. 600 shares of USO at $18.23 today. A small position, about 1% of portfolio.

 

[LOL!]

I submitted a sell order today, but screwed it up. It was a limit order just as I was trying to get out the door and I set the limit a dollar higher than I had intended, basically a typo, so it was not executed when I checked after the market close. So no sales today.

 

[LOL!]

The trade I didn't get going yesterday was completed today after I resubmitted it with a reasonable limit price, so that typo made me some money. The position was an old position in SCZ small-cap foreign developed that had doubled in price. I will pay no taxes on the gains since I have enough carryover losses from 2009 to net it out to zero.

After that trade went through, I put in a buy order for VTI about 0.5% lower than it was trading with the expection that it would not execute, but it did on a small intra-day drop. So my percentage of equities is about the same, but just a very tiny shift from small foreign to US from previous allocations. I may even sell this new position in the short term.

I post this mostly because I wanted to stick my neck out (and my money) to show that I think developed foreign markets even though they lost money in 2014 are not in recovery mode yet and won't be for awhile. I cannot sell out all of my developed markets because I am not 100% sure about their demise, so I have to hedge a little bit by keeping more than a lot of that asset class.

I still have the other cash poised to buy more equities hopefully later in the month.

 

[LOL!]

Yesterday's trades were beneficial by about an extra 1% of the money exchanged over doing nothing. This is because SCZ didn't go up much after it was sold even including today, but VTI has gone up more both yesterday and today.

Today I see something similar happening: VEA (large-cap developed) is up about 1.2% now, but VSS (small-cap foreign including developed and emerging) is up half as much at 0.6%. This doesn't make sense to me since small-cap emerging is up 1.4% (DGS) or 1.1% (EWX) and large-cap emerging is up 1.9% (VW0). So I am going to sell some VEA (as noted above) and buy VSS. To some extent VSS does replace the SCZ sold yesterday while getting some small-cap emerging gains for free.

If these trades go through, then I will not increase my equities at all nor my ratio of US:foreign. This is a short-term trade at no cost, too.

Wish me luck!

 

[LOL!]

Trades completed. I made the trades in 2 separate tax-advantaged accounts. In an IRA I sold VCSH and bought VSS with the money. So I was doubled-up in VSS+VEA while I took a shower. After the shower, I saw that VEA had continued to go up and VSS was about the same as purchase price. Then I sold VEA. I intend to buy VCSH with the cash.

I did it this way to be doubled up for a little while just in case something went up unexpectedly. (Yes, it could've gone down unexpectedly, too.) And so that I can still buy more VSS with the money from the VEA sale instead of VCSH. This will help avoid some free-riding and not having to wait T+3 for trades to settle. Whether I stay in cash or VCSH for a short time should not matter.

 

[NW-Bound]

So, with yesterday and today's gain, I have recovered more than 6 months of living expenses. It's still a long way till I can set a new personal high, with international and energy stocks being down so much. I read that the stock decline world-wide YTD, meaning just over 5 trading days, has wiped out $1.7 trillion USD.

I have not done any trading since buying EDC (3X leveraged EM) at $19.95 on 12/16. It closed at 23.10 today. If the market keeps climbing, I want to raise some cash to prepare for the next dip. The problem is always deciding what to sell.

 

[pb4uski]

It has been an interesting week for me... a roller coaster dip and recovery.

2-Jan	100.0%
5-Jan	98.9%
6-Jan	98.3%
7-Jan	99.0%
8-Jan	100.1%

 

[harley]

It has been an interesting week for me... a roller coaster dip and recovery.

2-Jan 100.0%

5-Jan 98.9%

6-Jan 98.3%

7-Jan 99.0%

8-Jan 100.1%

I think that roller coaster depends on your x axis. At 0 - 100(.1) I doubt you'd even notice.

 

[LOL!]

The dip in the developed large-cap international markets of about -5% since recent highs around December 29 equaled their entire loss for the year in 2014.

That is, folks who rebalanced between 12/29 and 01/04 didn't do themselves any favors.

 

[LOL!]

I'm continuing on a roll with my poor market timing skills. So far, the things I sold are all trading higher than when I sold them and the things I bought are all trading lower than when I bought them.

I shouldn't even be in cash since bond funds have gone up nicely in the past week, too.

But I did do some day trading and made $62.15, so I feel good. Maybe that's what I should be doing: more day trading.

 

[LOL!]

More day trading today. Bought some VTI earlier in the day, but submitted order to exchange same amount out of US equities in 401(k) to go into a bond fund. I scalped about a half-percent gain if the market holds up while not changing my asset allocation at all.

 

[NW-Bound]

Well, I am not a good market timer either.

The lot of EDC that I bought at 26.50 3 months ago is still underwater. It closed at 28.12 a month ago, but I did not sell. It is now at 21.80. Two days ago, I added a bit at 19.95. Will see if the whole thing makes me any money.

On the other hand, the semiconductor ETF I bought at $84.34 on Oct 17, then sold options to effectively sell it at $103 in Feb 2015, went as high as $146!

So, I sold the good one way too soon, while keeping the bad one too long. So far, loss cancels out gain, leaving me not too happy.

OK, some of my EDC shares start to get in the green at $24.48 as I write this. Hey, even a blind squirrel would find a nut sometimes by his nose. In any case, with only 1% of portfolio on this position, the gain hardly makes a dent in the bottom line. It will be a while before I set a new personal high watermark, because of other long-term positions that I have that got hurt bad such as energy stocks.

I am looking to unwind this short-term play. I probably will sell too soon and end up kicking myself, but that's nothing new.

 

[Brat]

I couldn't bring myself to look at our portfolio because of all the bad stock reports until today. Much to my amazement we are up for the year. Thank you Wellington Income and O. Wellesley isn't doing well, I assume Wellington is up because of its bonds. Our other holdings are need air freshener.

 

[LOL!]

Wellesley is doing great so far this year, much better than a 60/40 portfolio and better than Wellington.

 

[LOL!]

Several big news events are now past history: State of the Union, ECB QE, and the vote in Greece. The FOMC is still to play this week.

But the thought in the back of my mind that European stocks would go down was clearly wrong. Selling VEA and SCZ to buy VSS and VTI was a bust.

From my selling point VEA is up 3.8% and SCZ is up 2.9% while VSS is up only 1.5% and VTI is up only 2.5%.

Now it is not all bad news, however, as I rebalanced into equities on 1/14 and 1/15 and did some day-trading to pick up 0.5% a couple of times.

I am now overweight in equities by 2% of total portfloio value before the FOMC meeting and cannot decide to cut back before or after. I also have some cash that needs to go back into bond funds.

After the FOMC meeting: If bonds would drop, I would buy some. If equities dropped, I would buy some. If everything goes up, I would probably sell some equities and buy bond funds.

As far as market timing goes, this is all with about 2% of my portfolio.

 

[papadad111]

To keep us honest, I've had a pretty rough go with USO of late...

In November I tried to catch the falling knife and logged a 2K loss

In December, thinking i was going to harvest a few ST losses to offset ST gains before year end, I sold a position in USO for an 8K loss and then forgot the wash sale impact.... crap. So no write off... damn that hurt.

I re-opened the position in end of December....but then yesterday I sold some more USO...again, for a loss...and again wash sale impact will not allow me to take the entire loss now.

Still holding approx 50 percent of my december position but sitting on a chunk of short term losses.

I totally played this one wrong. I think we're not going to see oil pop any time soon and so going to exit the remainder of the position on any upward momentum as I believe it will be temporary and maybe, just maybe, i;ll get out OK.

 

[LOL!]

Bought some US small-cap value in the form of IJS today.

I can't tell where the market is going though, so I'll guess that we'll tread water here for awhile. I'll probably be wrong about that.

 

[LOL!]

My stock allocation moved up to 61% over the past few days which is too high for me, so I sold the IJS bought in the previous post.

 

[steelyman]

I finally finished the periodic investing program I've been doing for the past two years. This is for an inherited taxable IRA; my "personal" investments are separate. I am updating with the final allocations because I've been posting things all along here to this thread and no one has arrested me yet!

Here is the summary (all Fidelity funds, so I didn't bother with "Spartan", "Advantage", etc) after closing prices 2/3/2015.

This is formatted as a table, which doesn't seem to show up on my mobile device, only the full desktop site or if you specify "Web View" from the post in the app.

FUND	NAME	PERCENT
STOCKS
FSTVX	Total Market Index	7.38
FSEVX	Extended Market Index	19.57
FCNTX	Contrafund	18.42
FSIVX	International Index	13.12
FEMKX	Emerging Markets	6.69
BONDS
FSITX	US Bond Index	14.73
FINPX	Inflation-Protected Bond	4.9
FAGIX	Capital & Income	2.48
FNMIX	New Markets Income	2.53
REAL ESTATE
FRESX	Real Estate Investment	10.18

 

[LOL!]

Well, another time I could've timed it better. I'm trying to decide if I should sell more equities in the next 10 minutes. I guess not, even though I still have about 2%-of-portfolio more in equities than I should AND bond funds will not drop much today based on what bond ETFs are doing.

 

[imoldernu]

Exciting times.
DJIA up 850 points in 3 days.

 

[LOL!]

Easy come, easy go.

Today VNQ (REIT index) is down 3%. Should I chance a buy and hold over the weekend? Hmmm. Do I have the guts to do it? Not right now.

Edit at 3:55 EST: OK, a few minutes before market close I submitted a limit order to buy VNQ, but below current trading price. Let's see if we have one of those last-minute drops on the last trading day of the week.
Edit: Did not execute.

 

[LOL!]

I decided to make my 2014 Roth IRA contribution today, so that --along with the money from selling IJS noted above-- was used to buy the REIT index fund VNQ earlier today.

Things have progressed nicely this year with bond funds dropping about 1.5% since the beginning of February. Those bond funds had been up 2% in January which is kind too much too soon.

The drop in bond funds has helped me finally get ahead of the mutual fund I use for a benchmark since it uses the total bond market index fund for bonds while I use the total bond index plus some shorter duration bond funds. I was behind the benchmark since it was doing so well, but now I am ahead. That's just a little schadenfreude to help you laugh at me because I know you all are thinking the VNQ will drop like a stone after I bought several hundred shares.

 

[target2019]

This is my secret formula. I have VTRIX Int'l Value and VGSLX Admiral REIT in ROTH.

When I'm paying attention, I throw $1000 or $1500 at the fund which has suffered the most. For a long time it was REIT. The last couple of years Int'l Value has been stumbling. I also take a look at my asset allocation spreadsheet, and confirm that one of these needs attention.

Whether or not this works better than funding everything at the beginning of the year I do not know.