That puts us right on track for our $100,000 goal for the year so let’s not blow it. It’s all fun and games trying to turn $10,000 into $25,000 (last year’s goal) and then $25,000 into $100,000 because you know it’s a long-shot and it’s all fun and games but trying to turn $80,000 into $100,000 is RISKING $80,000 and that is NOT what we signed up for when we originally decided to risk $10,000. This is a classic trading mistake and not just with portfolios (virtual or otherwise) but with each individual trade – as the trade goes up in value, your risk increases and, very often, your potential additional reward decreases.
You need to understand this well enough to internalize it in order to make better trading decisions. We had the same issue last year when we were up to $35,000 in November off our $10,000 Portfolio and we decided to take the virtual money and run rather than risk going for $50,000 into the holidays. We’re not at that point yet as we’re still finding lots of fun things to trade but this week was substantially thinner in trading than the week before and we took our small profits quickly and were glad about it…
It is a very natural tendency to feel that, since you are up $70,000, you can afford to make bigger bets or take bigger chances – THAT IS EXACTLY THE URGE YOU MUST LEARN TO FIGHT! It’s the same urge that makes you want to make a big bet to "catch up" after taking a big loss – also a bad idea. If you can usually make 10% a month with a system and one month you lose 50% (as happened to spread traders last month), the best thing to do is just go right on making 10% a month. Over the course of a year, you can still make 70% – but only if you stick with your plan!
Our last update was sent out on the 3rd, at which point we had $78,910 of realized gains, offset by $5,115 of unrealized losses. As I said at the time: "I’m not too psyched about overly committing into this mess, which is why we have a constant mix of bullish and bearish…
