Today was more of a catch up than a breakthrough day for me.  Knowing that Lindsey has some magic voodoo that she can pull up at any time keeps me from going too crazy with gambles.  I’ll take profits sort of quick but will be quicker to take losses. 

It only took one downgrade from a relatively lesser-known company, Morgan Keegan, for RIMM to show it’s relatively overbought position and have a nice drop this morning (from 5% down to 7% down).  At this point there was another firm that was forced to come out.

I didn’t make any moves today, but I am happy that what I thought was a bunch of bad positions wound up not being as bad as I originally thought. You can see my original post this morning pretty much predicting a bad day. Well, after a terrible commute to work…

I made some purchases today, but didn’t sell anything.  I’m thankful that Dell didn’t report super well, helping to take things down after hours.  Now if only Bernanke would come forward and say “screw you all, I’m leaving rates alone”.  Ya… that would make my day and give me a shot of getting back into this competition.  Damn Lindsey..

Ya, SHLD stock dropped 15%, but that’s not a reason to expect the worst.  When the majority of the bears and bulls realize that another possible rate cut of 25 points will mean eventually devalue the dollar more, causing lots of “yuckiness” (that’s a real term, really).  I took positions a little early this morning, let’s see what happens…

Sears Holdings Corporation (SHLD) reported earnings this morning.  It reported net income declined to $2 million, or a penny per share, from $196 million, or $1.27 per share, a year ago. 

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. 

$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.