Portfolio Pursuit

Predictably pessimistic

March 04, 2025

What an absolutely crazy day, following crazy day, following a crazy week, and so on. As many of us expected the implications of tarfffs resulted in a very strong sell-off in the first part of the session. The puts I left in place overnight I was happy to offload for strong gains early. I had to close my Amazon call which became even more screwed in the sell-off. I knew that I was going to have to sell it Monday or today, and I do regret not closing the position earlier.

The downward momentum was so strong, as was my desire to make today green despite that bad AMZN call so I was extremely aggressive in my trading this morning and pushed over 40 trades in the first hour. As the price action started to slow down on the put options I decided to call it quits for the day.

My log indicates that I was executing trades every 90s, an intensity level I have not yet seen.

My adrenaline spiked during the frenzy such that I found myself too fidgety to be coherent. Definitely a good time to step away from the terminal. After some exercise I was able to return to society and focus on other work. . The sell-off bounced off the floor around the mid-point of the day and started to rebound which faded into the close.

"Tactically bearish" is a phrase I heard.

Almost everybody's earnings outlook have for the last two weeks has been sour. I do respect the companies who looked at the incredible volatility in February and said "we cannot forecast continued strong growth." Many of those companies took a hit as their stock price sank, only exacerbated by continued "softening economic growth."

Softening, correction, hedging.

A lot of people are unwilling to state the obvious: optimism has left the room.

Log

Trades

Holding

Options