Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Mid-Week Update: Weekly Win Streak in Jeopardy, Dialing Back Leverage

Scary moment this morning as I was down over 10% overnight - never a good thing. Showed me I was using too much leverage. I sold a few contracts to bring the ratio down further (1 Platinum and 1 Rough Rice - both were showing weakness).

I wasn't thrilled about having to sell before the 'system' said to, but better to live to see another day. Previously I had been allowing myself to use 33% of the leverage available - now I can see that's still too much. Going to dial it back to 25% and see how that goes. It's easy to dial back when you're down - I always have difficulty tempering my enthusiasm when everything is going up, up, and up. Currently have the leverage back to 28% - hopefully I can just grow my way down to the 25% mark :)

I went back and looked at weekly returns since I started the new system, and started tracking the weekly marks. A nice run of six straight positive weeks is in jeopardy, as the account sits barely positive on the week. We'll see how it shakes out. It's impossible to be up every week, but I figure if I manage to be up most weeks, with the down week not 'too' down', good things should result.

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