Monday, October 31, 2011

Coral-lated: Nightmare On MF Street


What a day! Though my MF position was small and I had cashed out on several winning positions last week - bringing my SBA portfolio to about 72% cash on Friday, I stayed up all night awaiting news on MF. In hindsight, I could have done some more cashing out as the one MF position I should have really cashed out on remained in my portfolio.

MF was a star in my portfolio last week and on average, I made two double percentage gaining trades with MF very quickly, banking an average of +22.53% on both trades along with profit-taking on JRCC and CENX. All of a sudden, the excitement skidded to a halt and the crash occurred - with barely a eulogy for the stock that could have turned me into Top(less) Chef if position sizing (and share halting) hadn't saved me. When will MF shares resume trading - if ever?

After quite some time with very little action on CENX and JRCC, I literally fell asleep with buy orders placed @ $11.11 and $10.10. CENX nearly got hit, but since it closed the day quite near its low, I'm moving my buy order down a bit further to target the $10.25 area since that shows very active price action on the way up. Even more active was $9.50, but will things break down that fast?

JRCC is holding up a lot better, but I'd like to see Money Flow move into oversold territory before I get in, so will also be moving the bid on this one down one notch to target $9.25.

Had shares on MF not been halted today, I would be getting quite a lot of hate mail from the market - as if things aren't bad enough already:

-1.02% SBA
-5.65% Roth IRA

-2.26% DJIA
-1.93% Nasdaq
-2.47% S&P

+22.14% VIX

-2.77% FTSE
-2.17% Eurofirst, breaking and closing below 1000 again...


I was just making progress again, HSFTs! From July till October, even with losses taken on AMD, BAC, GEN, and ZZ, I ended up with profits of about +15.63% ROI. [Taking losses and increasing trading capital brought the batting average down, but I'm still on my way to a slow recovery that'll hopefully continue to gain momentum}.

MF nearly put an end to my dreams of being Head Chef at the Hell's Kitchen Trading Floor. But it seems I've learned a bit of humility with position sizing through my TETSOB days and this managed to minimise the sting just a tiny bit. But getting into a stock literally minutes before it filed for bankruptcy? That's a scarlet letter I'll be carrying around for some time!


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