Portfolio Pursuit

Riding the roller coaster

March 06, 2025

Another wild ride today on the "will-they won't-they" tariff roller coaster. I could not make heads or tails of which way things were going to go before the open, which is never a good sign. I was not expecting NVDA to fall the way they did, but was able to catch some momentum there, since I believe more financial publications are going to be beating the bad-news-drum on AI hardware:

As US chip darlings struggle, some bet on software as next big AI play

Which is basically what I was saying in The AI Trade Is Dead, while I do believe the software differentiator is going to be where investment and value is going to flow next, I'm not quite sure we're there yet.

I tried something different today in that I game into the open with a game-plan of the symbols I was going to trade, where I have seen the most volatility and value in the past few days, and I queued up some orders with prices way off of the close from yesterday. The plan was to edit these orders as momentum started to swing one way or the other, which worked but I found an unexpected psychological downside.

Having the orders queued up made me want to trade the symbol even if the momentum didn't look right, or the entry was wrong. As a consequence, I ended up scuttling my early gains by trying to force something to happen with Broadcom (AVGO).

I did hit my mental stop and then had to put in an actual stop because the momentum kept swinging the wrong direction. Much to my chagrin those options would have gone green later in the session, but that's kind of irrelevant if the momentum swings such that it breaks my own rules of engagement.

I stemmed the losses by trading longer than I otherwise would have, finding good momentum plays throughout the day, despite some largely horizontal trading. I am seeing a pretty consistent rally into the close regardless of the day for many of these equities which means I should be packing it in before the three o'clock hour.

Log

Trades

Holding

Options