2022-03-28 — Bed

It’s 7:38. It’s been a rough day, trading wise, and… me wise. I’m gonna write a quickie and crash I’m exhausted.

Couldn’t fall asleep. Programmed my alarm incorrectly (set the alarm for p.m. instead of a.m. My phone alarm isn’t loud anymore like it used to be, and I can’t figure out why… So… 🤷‍♂️

I don’t know.

When I first woke up, I was super excited because one of my stocks was trading super high, and if I sold, I’d make like $1130. But I was concerned. I don’t know why I let myself be concerned. Just… the general recommendation for beginners is don’t trade premarket as a beginner. So even though it was way up, I was like, ok, no don’t trade premarket. Just wait.

So I waited, and the stock went way down. It was still a pretty decent up when the market opened for the morning, but then it started to slide again, which was weird because the earnings call this morning was good news, which was why the stock was up 6%, plus.

So, it dropped from like $1130 profit to like $500 profit, and I was about to sell, when I saw hesitation in the market, so I figured that since it was great news, the hesitation marked an up trend.

Nope. Little did I know that right about that time another report was published lowering the expectations for the stock–not to anything bad, just a little lower than the previous forecasts. Before I knew what hit me, the stock had gone from $1130 over to $500 over, to over $600 in the red!

😶

My perfect situation ruined because I put a recommendation over what was obvious–cash out. You made bank. Cash out.

So that hurt. Meanwhile, fortunately, my other stock was also up significantly. I sold before it reached it’s peak, so I didn’t get as much as I could have, but it was a solid gain. I made roughly $566 on that stock. Then I did something I shouldn’t have done. I found a stock that was trading evenly after having crashed hard. It was seemingly serene and consistent like it had hit it’s low for the day, and was just going to hold onto that low, trading just slightly up and down.

The catch was that it was just barely (the last 2 or three days) a super volatile–crazy volatile stock with the majority of it’s history being less than half where it was. It was just coming off a huge gain, and that was followed up by… we’ll get there.

I didn’t really know anything about the stock, just some super-quick research. It wasn’t a keeper stock, no track record to speak of, just… volatile right now.

So… yeah… it didn’t fit my personal strategic principles for good stocks to trade on. It was simply what seemed to be an opportunity to make little gains. I traded it 6 times sideways in probably less than 30 minutes and made $233.

Positive gains.

Then, after I’d cashed out, it started to go up a decent bit higher than where I left it, and I was like, I’m out. This is no longer predicable.

Gosh, I wish I’d stuck to that. I mean, I shouldn’t have been in the stock anyway, but I made the poor choice, and I did fine, and then I walked away, downstairs, actually, and chatted with my mom about the trading morning

After chatting a little bit, I went back upstairs, and I saw that the same stock had landed right back in the rut I’d left it in, same trough price, and I was like, what the heck, we’ll do one more.

So I bought, and then it dropped to it’s all-time trough (for the day, which was only a tiny bit lower, tying what it had done maybe an hour before).

Anyway, then came my huge mistakes (almost as big as not selling the one stock during pretrading hours when I absolutely should have). bigger than somehow obviously blowing it by not selling when all signs pointed to sell and take the great profit!).

So… I went to buy the stock again at the new trough, expecting be able to make a quick $50, nothing major, but then it began. I clicked to buy a second helping, but I accidentally clicked sell. Boom.

$150 loss. That settings error was my first loss. Before that, I was 14 of 14, 100% gainers only on my sales.

Ugh.

But, oh, how I wish it had ended there.

Double ugh.

The floodgates opened, and it just kept going down, slowly. Funny though, It wasn’t a crash. It was a consistent resistance. It would go down a penny and then hem and haw around for a while, then go down another penny, but the strong hesitation kept giving the appearance the rally.

But nope. It just. kept. going. down. I’ve not run into anything like it before yet (yes, I’m new to all this, of course, with very little history and experience). That’s what i get for jumping into a stock I shouldn’t be in anyway.

I did well, until I didn’t. Nope, those stocks ain’t worth the risk.

And man, I took it right on the chin. After losing the $150 to the mistake, I kept waiting for the dip up that had been happening all day, but it didn’t come! It just slid and slid and slid, methodically, slowly… and before I knew it, I was down $1100 on just that stock, with little sign of the slide abating.

I was shocked and mortified. Just… petrified.

Finally, I did the hardest thing I’ve done to date. I chose to swallow the loss. Just eat it. I shouldn’t have been trading that stock in the first place, and if I held onto it, it could well lose thousands.

What was I thinking?!?! That stock wasn’t my MO of the stocks I look for. I look for pretty stable over time, solid companies, where the fluctuations are relatively small because the don’t crash crash. They might slide a bit, but a 30% up or 50% down… ain’t gonna happen (barring craziness). They’re just too stable.

Well… I was toast with this one. So I lost $950 on that stock (thankfully, it went up a few pennies right before I sold, so it went from $1100ish down to $800 down. So, combined with the goof, that was a loss of $950, just on that one stock.

That completely wiped out the $233 I’d made on the same stock trading it sideways, and it eviscerated the gains from as well as the $566 gains from the first stock I sold

Between those two, I was $799 up on the day, but now I was $151 down, on the day overall.

Ugh.

And I still had my other stock that was surprisingly in the gutter after the ammendment to the positive quarterly earnings report. That one, a solid stock, I was nervous about, but I just left it and watched it. Slowly, throughout the course of the day, it clawed back from 3% down to something like 8 cents above opening.

I was in the green on that one. But there was yet another ridiculous mistake. I guess my lack of sleep could be influencing my struggles today somewhat? What happened this time? Somehow I lost my brain and thought the market closed at 4:30. I guess that’s also what I get for trying to fix cars and deal with customers while I’ve got stocks with pressing needs.

Anyway, so instead of selling for a small, but $50+ dollar profit, the day passed by yet again without me selling. I realized my mistake at like $3:01 (4:01 eastern).

Ugh.

So… there you go. What should have been a really easy $1500+ and done first thing in the morning gain day, turned into a wipeout where I lost all my gains for the week. Add in the fees I paid for wire transfers to try to fix my other rookie mistakes, and I’m in the red overall, about $133 (of sold stocks). I should be up nearly $2000.

Ugh. Stephen.

At this point of the day, I’ve come to terms with it, but it was pretty rough there for a while. Now I’m just like… okay… dumb decisions. Rookie/careless/tired mistakes. And then having to pay what a brother of mine might quaintly call the stupid tax.

It was the same thing I did with buying and selling cars. I made profit pretty much every time, and I got careless. That’s what happened today. I got careless. Despite the huge missed opportunity of the morning, it had still been a great day, and I was calm and rockin’ it.

Oops.

No more oopses, ok? Careful. Discplined. Buy good stocks, not something that looks like a quick and easy opportunity that was… until it wasn’t.

I’m calm now and feel perhaps more sheepish than the super strong feelings I had earlier today.

I think the hardest thing about what happened today is the same as what happens everywhere else. I have no resilience to things going poorly/sideways anymore.

I know I’ve written about that before, but it bears repeating because it’s my reality. I don’t have anything in life I’m looking forward to. Confidence in god, completely, and that has wrecked me. But I just can’t risk believing anymore. I just can’t.

And yet, there’s a part of me that probably still does. But I can’t risk it anymore. I’m barely a shell of the person I was, and these obstacles in my path, these challenges, unless things go smoothly all day, I just don’t have the resilience to handle it. And I’m a mechanic–of course things are going to go sideways on a regular basis. But when things go sideways, I crumble because I have no resilience, and I have nothing to fall back on. There’s not real joy or happiness. There’s fun and there’s manufactured drive (which is sometimes real drive, but is often just probably just a coping mechanism for staying vertical and just curling into a ball and… I don’t even know what.

And I’m lonely–very lonely.

Having lost my faith, I don’t really fit in anywhere, I don’t feel like anyway. I have zero intimate friends now–maybe my friend John. We could probably talk about anything. But I’m just in a different place than my other friends and family. I’m not mormon. I’m not not mormon.

That’s a nightmare in and of itself.

I’m not ready to say never again, but in the meantime, I don’t feel like I fit in at all anywhere, and I don’t really feel like i have anyone who I can talk to about it all.

I know that I believe in lifting the world and sharing love, but my passion for life and what I do each day is manufactured. I find a way to create the drive, create some hope, create some meaningful existence, but when things go sideways, even slightly, I’m… a mess.

Oh, if I could just turn back time and cut an entire decade plus out. Heck, I’d settle for complete amnesia. At least then I’d have no memories of what still binds me with chains as long as those of Marley’s Ghost.

No, I’m not depressed right now, if you’re wondering: I’m just acutely aware that I am simply existing without a sense of mission, purpose, hope, or meaning, etc. I try to manufacture some long enough to maybe get it to stick, but it never does.

Something’s gotta give, right? Maybe I can hope for that. I’ll figure something out.

2 cars. Was hard to work with everything that happened today. First one was a super easy rear trunk strut. Next one was a misfire issue that also had a bad battery.

From there I figured I’d try and do some good, so I took the trash up to the dumpster, gave a hug to one of my hill siblings who’s been having rough times like I am, got the go kart started for my niece and nephew, and then hooked up the handheld bidet in the bathroom. I guess that last one was more for me than for others, as I’m probably the only person who’s gonna use it.

Nasty, filthy, dirty, poo smearing until it’s “dry” toilet paper. Really is a disgusting “hygiene” practice, using toilet paper to smear poop around until sufficiently few particles show up on the white paper that we call it good.

Mmmm… yup, sure is clean. Let me tell ya.

Sorry, soap box/tangent.

From there, it was dinner and this journal entry, the 729th in a row (unless we’ve had a leap year? Yeah, I think we have… so probably 730th already.

I guess I didn’t write a short entry like I thought I was going to.

Go figure. 🙃I’m going to enjoy sleeping tonight.

Good night. Lift the World.

~ stephen