2022-04-12 — ‘Nother Down

Hola, my wonderfuls. 😊

I put my 2015 Nissan Sentra up for sale late last night, and I had lots and lots of people express interest, even in the middle of the night, so that was promising.

Went to bed and slept decently. I got up early to trade the market, and I made a gajillion trades, but things were… choppy. The leading gappers and gainers popped as normal, but then pretty much all of them crashed after hitting their tops, it seemed. That made for some pretty stressful trades. I had one trade where I bought properly, only to see it drop just as quickly as it went up, sending me super quickly $600+. I thought about cutting my loss, but the price was so far below all of the indicators for where it should end up, that I decided to hold.

Gratefully, the stock popped back all the to break even and beyond, and I even made a little bit. I was so happy that I got back to break even, that I didn’t bother to stick around to see if it was going to go higher. I just sold, and called it good.

The trading day was like that all morning. I had one that I actually did go down $400ish on, and I did cut my losses and move on, which I’m glad I did because again, it was one that skied high and crashed fast.

Weird day. It was like every stock did that today.

Gratefully, I was able to build back with good trades until I got the $400 back, got back to break even. In the end, I finished up a grand total of about $12 for the morning. 🙃 I would have been up a tad over $100, but I was like “I’ll just do one more trade.”

Right. 🙃 I lost $95 on that one, which was why I ended the day up only $12. I had 19 winner trades and 11 loser trades, the $400 loss being the biggest of the day. My average gainers for the day were $37 winners per trade, and my average losers were $64.

That’s good data. My losers are a lot bigger than my winners. I have a lot more winners than losers, but I hold the losers too long, not wanting to lose and ending up losing more. I think that might be what’s happening.

That’s correctible. Cut the loss, get out. Sometimes, holding the stock will give time to crawl back a big loss to a lesser loss, a break even, or even a gain (like today with the one I was way down on that turned into a small gain), but letting losses get big is one of the biggest failures of new traders.

Hmm… I can’t relate at all. 🙃

Cars… first car was supposedly a leak, but it wasn’t a leak, it was a blown head gasket. 😬 Her coolant overflow tank was full of an oily/antifreeze mix. Poor girl. She also asked me to look at her dad’s Jeep that was low on coolant. Couldn’t find any provable coolant leak, but I found multiple oil leaks, but nothing crucial, so I just advised them to watch things an see, but that I didn’t see anything really critical.

2nd car was… I forget. Gosh… what was it? Brain. Work. … ugh. I don’t remember. I remember the address but not the vehicle. 🙃 Oh, yeah! Dodge Nitro no start. Bad battery in the key and probably a bad key in general. Gonna need to get the little fob battery, and quite possibly, if that battery doesn’t fix it for them, they’ll likely need to have a lock smith make and program a new key.

3rd car was a warranty claim. I’d pulled a part of another car to diagnose the car I was working on, and the car I was working on ruined the new part I was using to test it. Ugh. Didn’t feel good about telling AutoZone it should be warrantied out, as it was another one of their parts that made it bad but not the original, so… not really an honest warranty claim, so I ended up eating nearly $200 to get another new part for the customer.

But hey, it’s been on my schedule for probably over a month, so it’s done now, and that’s something. Nice to have the eternal cars gone.

Last car was a 2004 BMW Z4. I’m not gonna work on that one again. It’s kicked my butt both times I’ve gone out there, but I didn’t want to say no after I already had said yes. Spent nearly 3 hours there, getting very little done. Couldn’t really charge for the time I was there because I didn’t really accomplish much, and I didn’t accomplish much because much of the time I was there, I was in over my head.

Can’t charge for time when it’s my ignorance that is causing it to take so long.

That was the last car. Very little accomplished today.

BUT!!! Thanks to my wonderful mother, my Nissan Sentra has been sold (well, they’ve paid a $350 nonrefundable deposit), and they’ll be by tomorrow to pay the balance and drive the car away.

So! Another vehicle down. More projects that have been added links in my Marley chain, but I’m consistently cutting off the links one by one.

Wahoo!

Well, folks, time for bed. Just about to hit midnight. I broke my no sugar thing today. Hadn’t had candy in… years? Bought some. Ate a good amount. Not feeling well. 🙃 Stomach feels… ugh. So… back to no candy.

Funny.

I think I was looking for some sort of comfort via food, right?

Anyway, g’night folks. Hope y’all had a beautiful day. 😊

Lift the World

~ stephen