PhilStockWorld August Trade Review – Riding the Rapids

That about sums up our August as the indexes dropped all month long – down 800 points on the Dow (5%) and 80 points on the S&P (5%) and etc., etc…  As long-term investors, we know we're going to get a little wet when the market turns down – the trick is to stay in the boat and be ready to ride the next profitable wave.  

As I reminded readers on Friday, I never thought the summer would be worth playing in the first place – calling for our Members to cash out and taking a nice summer vacation way back in May.  Many people took my advice and we've had a pretty quiet summer in chat but now it's time to go back to work – hopefully at the bottom of a bigger sell-off than the 5% we've had so far.  The short story of the Summer is that we fell 5% into the end of June, gained 5% in July and fell 5% in August so here we are, back where we ended May.

We don't track our virtual portfolio trades in these reviews – this is for all the trades we don't track – which is most of them, of course.  Of coruse, this is an arbitrary point in time and some trades could have had better (or worse) exits in between – we're not doing this to keep score, just to get an idea of what worked and what didn't in the past month so, hopefully, we can make better decisions this month.   

As I noted last month, these trades tend to do better BECAUSE we leave…