2011 Stock Trading Results

This will not focus on political or macro events, but merely the success and failures of this blog and my trading. 

I consider this a successful year for both my trading and my blog's growth.

In the interest of full disclosure, I decided to report my Jan 3 - Dec 30 2011 trading history.  Find another site that will do that.

After four long years of many frustrations and a bad 2008 (the only non-profitable year), I handily beat the market in 2011 (20% versus flat) without fancy research reports and using only a few tools.  Granted, this is probably considered a small account to most of you.

 

I drew black or red lines around massive losses that I incurred.  Most are not realized because I'm stubborn - BBX, CHRS, CPF, MTG, OGXI, SCSS - another 15% that could have been added to the bottom line.  Maybe they will keep getting bigger and will wipe out all of this year's wins. Who knows? I still believe we are in a long term (decades) bear market, and that is why I haven't closed them. 

All were the result of bad money management and not cutting losses.

A lot of traders tell you to focus on the big wins - having a high slugging percentage and cutting losers.  I still agree with that, but in a sideways year it is harder to get the big winners.  My 2011 history shows a solid batting average and consistency that was able to overcome massive losses and show a profit.  I am not proud of the losses, but its a learning point for you and me about how important money management is.

Since it is the end of the year, I also wanted to update some of the charts. Here is Gold versus USAGX, Silver, Nasdaq, and the 70s commodity bull markets.

Source:  Various.  gold.org / yahoo finance

Gold still seems to resemble several parts of the Nasdaq bull market.

Energy consumption for the US.

 Source: http://www.eia.gov/  The economic recovery story doesn't seem to surface here.

I would guess earnings can easily be higher now that debt issuance (& inflation) has largely taken the place of taxation for government spending. 

People keep saying bond yields will rise in the US soon.  Looks like it took about 50 years for yields to get back to where they were in 1921.  Just saying.

Source:  Shiller data.  Dividend yield still doesn't say "buy."  In fact, it is not even close.  Now you know why I stay short on a mattress company.

I marked the three dates above to correspond with the below posts.  Yes, my posts are wishy-washy, but that is because I know I don't know.  I just go with the odds - sorry if I don't lead you more to the water.  Oversold to me means buy most of the time, and overbought means sell most of the time.  I don't need to put more than that.  As for the first half of 2011, as most of you know I am better at calling bottoms than tops.

http://thelastcanary.blogspot.com/2011/06/5-june-2011.html

http://thelastcanary.blogspot.com/2011/07/7-july-2011.html 

http://thelastcanary.blogspot.com/2011/08/22-aug-2011.html

Don't forget my posting about how silly it was to be buying silver in April as it hit its 3rd standard deviation.  Or the targets I set 2.5 months ago for silver of 21 - 25 and gold of 1420.  I was junked heavily on Zerohedge for both of those predictions...

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise."
 F. Scott Fitzgerald

I get a lot of my quotes from nowandfutures.com - check out their site.  Lots of great information.