Monday, June 21, 2010

Old School Trade Worksheet (comedic value here)

Yesterday while cleaning up some piles of papers I ran across what was my staple "back of the napkin" type of calculations for trade ideas used to be. This is from March 2009 when I was willing to go nuts on bull call spreads because I thought the world wasn't going to end. This particular idea looks to be a theory that either the world really is going to end, or its not and this level is ridiculous. In the end I ended up going with a bull call spread but its interesting to see my thought process, or lack there of, back then. There were originally about 20 of these pieces of paper and index cards at the time with misc ideas on them. No charts, no mention of IV's (since I had no concept of what that was), no exit point or mention of anything other than the stated risk/reward in dollars. I got lucky with a gut call, but clearly that's all it was, luck. So I'm actually going to keep this around as a reminder of both how far I've come and just how arcane my trading really was in the not so distant past. Had I not bettered myself, it clearly looks to me as if my style of investing/trading in the past was really a time bomb that just never went off.

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