A little peace

Try leaving a huge majority of your profits on the table. Whatever the reason -- you were asleep (market opens 3:30 a.m. Hawaii time, the broker's site was screwed up, you traded on margin instead of cash by accident, whatever -- it never feels good to see paper profits disappear. Yeah, it sucks. Might take you a minute to get over losing that 70% gain. Might take you a day. Maybe a year.

For me, it was a day. A rotten day of misery and regret, but I got over it mostly. By the time I emptied out of my C shares (almost all) before today's close at 2.56, I had the knowledge that any raucous, bad news for financials over the weekend won't break my heart. It was a trade to start and a trade to finish. I still made 10% for the week. That's no 70%, but it's better than my modest goal of 1% average gain per week. (At 1% per week, that's 52% for a year. I'll take that all the time.)

Do I wish? Yeah of course. Could've sold C at 3.40 (when I woke up yesterday after the huge run-up). Could've sold at 3. Could've sold at 2.80. Even today, it hovered in the 2.70 range, but I waited. (Went to sleep, actually.)

The other positive to having some peace of mind is that I'll be ready to step into another trade if the opportunity is there on Monday. I heard this last week, and I should've thought of it yesterday morning: Always better to sell too soon than too late.