Mindful Trader Commentary For May 4, 2023


Hey Guys,


The market didn't respond favorably to the Fed announcement and went down even further. Almost all stocks are down right now, and the banking sector got hit particularly hard. The S&P 500 is around 4,070 right now.


That made for a very poor week for my main account. I hit a couple more stoplosses this morning (XRAY and GS). So far for the week, I have no wins on stock trades in that account. It's in a drawdown.


For most people, including me at times, it can be hard to live through weeks like this. It's one of the hardest parts of trading: living through drawdowns.


One thing that helps me is to look back at the last time there was a week like this, and see what happened afterward. And in my case, it was back in the middle of February. Right after the tough February week, there were eight weeks of net profitability.


I'm not in any way saying we should expect to have profitability immediately after this tough week. There is real risk involved. But I am saying that you never know what will happen next in the market. So rather than zooming in on this week's performance and thinking of it as some sort of catastrophe, I try to zoom out my perspective a little and look at the big picture.


Despite all the market turmoil, somehow my AZN options hit their profit target yesterday.


I did pick up new positions today. In the main account, I bought stock for TRU and GMAB. In the options account, I bought options for SO. In the double down account, I bought stock positions for JKHY and BDX.


I have a number of options positions that reached their time limit today. I'll be manually closing those near the end of the trading session today unless they reach their profit targets first.


If you have any questions or feedback, I'd love to hear from you.


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