"...My question is: are you making money in the current volatile economic climate and if so how? How has the turmoil in your local economy/exchange/country influenced how you trade and what your more recent performance is? What are you doing or do you think you will doing in the next days and weeks (as it changes so frequently, who knows what months will bring)?..."
IMO, anyone who has a proven winning system should simply continue to trade it, as objectively and dispassionately as possible. My experience so far this year. My preferred method (long-only) is to wait for a moderate correction in the overall market (10%-15%), then start looking for a signal from the SP500 Index that things have bottomed-out and are headed higher, and finally buying a portfolio of high-growth/high RS small caps for an intermediate to long-term trade. Now, earlier in the year my method was working within expected parameters, but within the past 3 weeks I had a rare, but over-large drawdown. (A lot of it came on just that one day when the DJIA fell by 700+ points.) Key point: Painful as this is, it's a *normal* part of any system, they'll *all* do this at some point, and anyone who tells you different is trying to sell you something.:) My trading response: When I saw this happening with my method, I recognized what was going on in the markets (runaway directional downmove spurred by panic selling), dumped all my longs, simultaneously got *short* (inverse SP500 ETF), quickly made-up about 1/3 of my recent losses, and then got back out. Now, I'm waiting for my method to generate a new "buy" signal. It's times like this that AB can be *the most* valuable to us, by keeping us grounded in the objectivity of well-tested, proven methods. I'm not afraid of my next "buy" signal and I'm sure as Hell not going to ignore it because I think I "know" better than my system.:) JMO, FWIW. Sincerely, Sebastian
