With my tail between my legs, admitting defeat to RIMM, I sold for a killer loss.  Time to hunt for something that I can make a killer gain with now.  After dropping so much on RIMM there’s not much choice for me, I have to play more aggressively.

So I’m watching the market (too closely) and noticed that things are really not going my way.  The longer I sit here the more I am losing money.  This isn’t how I will win any competition.  Since I don’t know where the market is heading (nobody does, I realize that), I’m going to sell and just take the losses.  Soon.  Maybe.

This morning started out as I thought it would, punishing me for having puts and not calls.  RIMM opened up way higher than I would like, even for just selling for a loss.  So the idea is to watch as we might have had a top for the day and hopefully the reality will set in and the market will head lower.

Resistance for the Russell 2000 (IWM) is a little below $76 so unless that resistance is hit, I’ll be holding my puts for a couple days minimum or until a profit is made.

The Nasdaq gapped up +26 points this morning opening at 2607.  It felt strong to me and I hopped on to catch some of the upswing.  I think it could make a decent attempt towards its 50 day EMA which is 2679 - that’s a good additional 72 points.  I turned to JCP (JC Penney’s) for a trade. 

The day ended with a run up which I sort of expected a little, but probably not quite as much as actually happened.  Of course RIMM ended up pushing pretty high (daily high actually).  I’m looking at my position and still believe that it’s good, but chances are that I’ll be wrong and sell for a loss.

Freddie Mac, the second-biggest source of money for U.S. home loans, plans to sell $6 billion in preferred stock and cut its dividend in half to shore up capital depleted by record mortgage defaults and foreclosures.

The two-part sale will include non-convertible, non- cumulative preferred stock and a “substantially smaller” portion of convertible preferred shares, Freddie Mac said in a statement today. The company will save about $650 million a year by reducing the dividend to 25 cents, Sharon McHale, a spokeswoman, said.

Alright, that’s a really old TV game show.  Whatever.  Anyway, I figured that today was just a bloated move upward and wouldn’t continue, so I decided to buy puts against the Russell 2000.  Smart?  Maybe, maybe not.  I’m just here to make money though so this is probably a good idea.

The market opened up this morning.  My gut feeling is there’s downside to the market but not a whole lot.  I did not want to hold SHLD puts through a market bounce.  I sold my SHLD puts when SHLD was $109.80.  It immediately dipped afterwards so I was a little regretful but looking at SHLD now (>$112) I don’t feel so bad.  I turned to First Solar, Inc (FSLR) for a daytrade.  It was down over 8 points so I looked at the Dec 07 Calls $210.  There was a $1 spread between the bid/ask.  I did not want to miss the bounce so I ended up trading the stock. 

RIMM can be a mean, mean girl sometimes.  I’ve lost my share of pre-competition money to RIMM and also been too nervous to keep a winner and given up over $20,000 in profits by selling too early.  These days with only $5k starting in an account, I need to be more cautious and pick better entries and exits.

$5000 in my account.  $5000 in Michael’s account.  And with today’s opening bell, our competition started.  Our race to $25,000 and beyond.  I could have started trading pre-market but I knew better than to do that.  Because of daytrader pattern account rules and our accounts being below $25,000, we have limits on how much we can trade in a day.  I knew Michael wasn’t going to waste his buying power on stocks and I wasn’t going to either.  Options - that’s where leverage is at.