Boogster’s Blog

Got greedy and bought 1000 shares of VXX at $27 and sold at $24.  You can do the  math.  I am still holding 300 shares, since I actually had 1300 shares at one point.  It was tough taking the loss, but I had to do it.  I will get back in eventually, as I am playing for this market to go south in the intermediate term.

I was supposed to “scale in” from here on out, but I got a little greedy on this trade.  All good.

So I emailed my trading buddy yesterday and here’s what he said:

“I think it may push higher to 1140s-1150s by next week or so then it will dip lower from here in next two ot three months. Maybe low 900s.”

Seems to coincide with what The Fly is thinking as well, so let’s just go with it.  I will add to my VXX position lower.  Maybe get a few other short ETFs.

Here’s what I’m holding now:

• 100 AMZN @ $142.97
• 100 ASEI @ $73.63
• 500 IBKR @ $16.02
• 1000 UNG @ $8.70
• 300 VCLK @ $9.70
• 300 VCLK @ $11.20
• 300 VXX @ $23.88
• 500 UYM at $30.14

Went up to Charles Town Races & Slots last Thursday.  Third time for me now.  It only took about 30 minutes to get onto a table this time.  Things are getting much better up there.  I played $2/$5 NL the entire night.  Was up about $700, until I flopped top two and some lady flopped bottom set.  I called the whole way and probably lost the minimum.  I should’ve folded though as I was about 80% certain that she had a set of deuces.  F me.

In another hand, I lost with a lower flush (8-9 suited).  I tell you what, if you hit a lower flush, be careful!  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve lost a good amount of money to a higher flush.  Next time, I will be a lot more cautious.

Anyways, I ended up winning about $200.  I’ve won 3 out of 3 times now for about $800 total.  Kinda nubs for the amount of hours that I played…probably about 16-20 hours total.

My golf game.  Still putting in a lot of rounds this year.  Just not writing about it as much.  My handicap is near it’s low again at 13.0.  I have my good days and my bad days.  One of my biggest problems has been laterally shifting instead of turning.  When I turn, instead of shift, I hit a lot more solid shots instead of the fat/thin shots.  Try it out some time.  I recently changed putters too, to an old blade that I have.  It’s help me a little bit.  Watched Mickelson’s short game dvd again too.  That thing is golden.  I’d recommend bit torrenting that bitch if you’re a golfer…

Taking a road trip today in my silly Jeep Commander.  Ohio, Chicago, then Madison.  I think it takes about 14 hours from DC to Madison, so it’s going to be a long one.  Lots of coffee and lots of pee breaks.  I’ve never really been to chicago before, so that should be a fun one.  Madison, WI…I will buy some cheese.

I got the new iPhone 4 a couple of days ago.  I was waiting for the white one, but it’s been delayed til the “end of the year”.  F that.  The iphone 4 is not that much different than my 3gs.  The resolution and battery life are noticeably better, but is it really worth the upgrade?  Not really, but I need to have the latest and greatest.  Facetime is pretty silly too.  However, I don’t envision facetiming one of my buddies any time soon because I don’t want to see someone’s face when I’m talking to them on the phone.  Seriously.  “Oh you got something on your face…did I get it…no, on that side…ok, you got it now”. Seriously.  My conversations are normally, “you want to golf…yes…ok, 2:15 tee time…cya”.

Alright…time to roll.  No golf for about two weeks…what a dagger.  Gotta drop the dog off at Dogtopia first.  Lots of randomness, I know.  I’m out.

So, I am closing my Interactive Brokers account. Yup. I haven’t done much futures trading lately, but I did enjoy being able to see futures/forex quotes on a daily basis (and the cheap commissions), but now I can use Ameritrade‘s thinkorswim platform for my futures/forex quotes. And it’s pretty silly.

I have three accounts with Ameritrade and a fourth unused account, which I used to daytrade in back in the days, until I discovered IB.  But now, I’m going back to Amertirade.  I just wanted to consolidate all of my accounts, instead of logging into two separate systems.  And now that I can use thinkorswim, I pretty much have everything I need through Ameritrade.

This thinkorswim platform is pretty nice too.  It’s continuous futures charts, which IB didn’t have.  And now, I have my McClellan Oscillator back as they have ProphetCharts integrated into their platform.  I’ve only been using it for the past two days, but from what I’ve played with, it can pretty much do everything I want it to do.

I love the charts too.  It’s so much faster than IB’s clunky java charts, which I NEVER used.  I also noticed that there is an option for “real time” quotes too, instead of a max 2-second delayed quotes from IB.  Not that it makes a huge difference to me, but it’s nice to see every trade and size instead of the delayed quotes which may sometimes be clumped together with other trades.  I think that’s how it works.

Now, here’s the kicker.  There’s always a kicker.  Thinkorswim charges $3.50 per contract one-way.  Yes, that $7 per round-trip trade.  Eeek.  Yes, that’s a lot.  In comparison, IB charges $1.14 per contract on the major index futures.  Honestly, I don’t trade that much futures these days anyways, so it’s no biggie for me.  And if I do trade, it will be multi-day or multi-week, not day trades, like I used to do.  So, this will work for me.  Definitely, more for the casual trader versus the daily trader.

Also, I think if I talked to my Ameritrade rep, he’d probably be able to hook me up with some sort of commissions discount.

Thanks to the help of The Fly, I was able to make $3.8k on my VXX trade.  Fortunately, I unloaded in the high $30s and my last 500 shares at $32.69.  We’re trading sub $27 now, so F Me, if I twitched or went to play golf on that day it went above $32, I’d be screwed now.  I actually had 1,000 shares for a little bit.  Anyways, without this trade, I’d be $3.8k poorer now.

What else…I sold my 300 shares of UYM for -$1k.  This stupid ETF owns me.  I bought at $29.30 and sold at $25.90.  I am back in again at $24.10 as of yesterday.  300 shares.  Definitely net down on this fucker.  I was seriously contemplating deleting the ticker from my watchlist, but I am a stubborn mofo and I will try to get it back, or maybe lose a lot of money in the process.

I also dumped 100 shares of AMZN near $112 for -$870 or so.  I am back in 200 shares at $110.26.  I have 300 shares total now.  The other 100 shares were bought in the $142s…doh!  I’m just trying to average down a little bit, as that 100 shares is meant to be for the longer term.

Here’s what I’m holding now:

• 100 AMZN @ $142.97
• 100 ASEI @ $73.63
• 500 IBKR @ $16.02
• 1000 UNG @ $8.70
• 300 VCLK @ $9.70
• 300 UYM @ $24.10
• 200 AMZN @ $110.26

Nothing big.  For the year, I think I am up a few Gs.  Ugghh.  Making money in the stock market may be worse of a grind than playing poker.  Anyways, I am going to tread carefully over the next few months and hopefully end the year with a nice gain.

Went up to Hollywood Casino at Charles Town Races last night.  Or as some 2+2′s call it: HC@CT.  Pretty nice place.  It has the feel of any Atlantic City casino.  And the best thing is that it’s only about an hour away.

Yesterday, the poker room was only open from 8pm until 4am.  We didn’t get there until about 8pm.  By the time we got our names on the list, there were already 80 people in front of us on the $1/$2 NL list, about 40 on the $2/$5 NL list.  Pretty crazy.  They only opened 10 tables, 4 tables for $1/$2 and 2 tables for $2/$5 and the rest were $3/6 Limit, $5/$10 NL, and $10/$20 limit.  Took me 2 hours to get on a $3/$6 limit table, and almost 3 hours to get on a $2/$5 NL table.  It probably would’ve taken 4 hours to get on the $1/$2 NL table, but I didn’t wait long enough for that one.

Supposedly, they don’t have enough dealers licensed to deal, which is why they only have 10 of the 27 tables open.  By Friday, all of the tables should available…so they say.  And I think they’re going to be extending the operating hours by Friday.  Of course, I’m getting all of this from 2+2.

Overall, the place is pretty damn nice.  I was pleasantly surprised.  I was thinking riverboat, dungy and dirty type, but the place was actually pretty nice.  And the drive up there wasn’t too bad.  Took me about 50 minutes.

Saw this on the CBS Sunday Morning Show:

It takes a few days to make each knife.  How much?  The cool price of $1,499.95.  I might have to get me one.

Went to the grocery store yesterday and they were sold out of Ora Ida tater tots.  Dagger.

Took my dog for a walk today and he ended up rolling around in some poo.  And I’m pretty sure it wasn’t dog poo.  Bum poo.  Absolutely disgusting, considering that I had to bathe him afterwards.  A dung beetle was attached.

Went to Mexico two months ago and turned on my iphone just to see if it would work.  It downloaded all of my emails, then I turned it back off.

Checked my bill the other day and they charged me $17.47 for downloading one batch of emails.  Dagger.

AMZN is down $11 today or 10%.  I had 200 shares as of this morning.  Sold out of 100 shares near $111.  Still a dagger though.

Only good news is that I bought 500 shares of VXX near $25.86 to hedge my murdered longs.  It gets me back $2.6k, but still down about $4k from my highs at the gap last Monday.

Had a trojan/virus infect my laptop over the weekend.  Every time I did a search via Bing/Yahoo/Google, it would redirect my results to some weird website.  I used all different browsers (safari, chrome, opera, firefox, IE) and the problem was the same.  I was thinking that there was a proxy or something, but if there was a proxy, it should’ve have affected all browsers.

Normally, I can just run AVG/Malwarebytes/SuperAntiSpyware to remove the trojan, but this time it didn’t quite work.  I look through all of  the “run” keys in my registry and deleted a some weird key that kept adding itself.  It was weird because it looked like it was trying to run an AVI movie file with VLC, my video program.  I’m guessing that this program was the culprit because I’ve never seen a video trojan before, but this thing was definitely running an AVI file.

Anyways, after removing the AVI file, I was still having the same problem.  I posted on Techsupportforum.com (this free support website is SILLY).  They just responded this morning.  Fortunately, I found the culprit last night.  Looks like my hosts file was modified, so that when I went to google/bing/yahoo, I was actually visiting a fake clone website.   Here’s the infected hosts file:

89.149.193.132 www.google.com
89.149.193.132 us.search.yahoo.com
89.149.193.132 uk.search.yahoo.com
89.149.193.132 search.yahoo.com
89.149.193.132 www.google.com.br
89.149.193.132 www.google.it
89.149.193.132 www.google.es
89.149.193.132 www.google.co.jp
89.149.193.132 www.google.com.mx
89.149.193.132 www.google.ca
89.149.193.132 www.google.com.au
89.149.193.132 www.google.nl
89.149.193.132 www.google.co.za
89.149.193.132 www.google.be
89.149.193.132 www.google.gr
89.149.193.132 www.google.at
89.149.193.132 www.google.se
89.149.193.132 www.google.ch
89.149.193.132 www.google.pt
89.149.193.132 www.google.dk
89.149.193.132 www.google.fi
89.149.193.132 www.google.ie
89.149.193.132 www.google.no
89.149.193.132 www.google.de
89.149.193.132 www.google.fr
89.149.193.132 www.google.co.uk
89.149.193.132 www.bing.com

Made sense because the problem affected all browsers.  The search pages looked exactly the same and everything.  The only difference was the fact that the signin and igoogle links showed up, when they normally don’t show up.  Here’s a screen capture:

I readded the ip addresss to my hosts file as infected.google.com just to see the infected website again.  I hope I didn’t try to login to my gmail account because if I did, they’d have my password now.  I’m pretty sure that I didn’t though.

I just updated my version of VLC from 1.0.5 to 1.1.0.  Hopefully this will fix the problem for next time.

Damn, had a scare with my dog this afternoon.  After getting done with a walk, I went back into my condo and onto the elevator.  I normally just push my floor and then the “door close” button.  My dog normally follows me into the elevator, but this time he got distracted and stayed outside.  Since there is no delay in our elevators when someone pushes the “door close” button, the door closed as I tried to stick my foot into the elevator door to stop it from closing.  Well, the door closed before I could stop it.

With my dog still outside, the elevator proceeded to go up to the third floor.  My flexi-leash is 16 feet long.  In the split second, I knew it would be close.  As I got higher, the tension on the flexi-leash got tighter.  Finally, it was rigid with no room slack.  I heard my dog yelping below.  Nothing I could do.  After I got to the third floor, I quickly pushed the lobby button and the elevator felt like it took forever to get back down there.  By this time, the leash had pulled so tight to the elevator door that I knew he was in trouble.

As I got back down to the lobby, the doors opened and there were a bunch of people there.  One was holding the dog and the other was had the leash unhooked.  Wow.  F me.  My dog had shit and pissed everywhere in terror.  The dudes said that they heard the dog yelping and they quickly unhooked him.

I got lucky.

This story could very well have ended badly.  I really did get lucky.  First off, I was on the third floor, so I think the leash length was actually just enough, so that the leash took him about 3/4s of the way up the door.  Secondly, two guys below were standing near the lobby elevators and reacted quickly.  It was a scene straight from the horror movies, except I was part of it.  The whole thing probably lasted no more than 30 seconds.

I checked the elevator and there is no emergency stop button.  And there’s no way that I would’ve been able to break the leash off with my bare hands.  Also, if I would’ve pull the leash to try to break it, I would’ve been pulling on his neck.  That wouldn’t have worked.  That was scary though.

Luckily it ended well, but it shouldn’t have happened in the first place.  Can’t dwell on it though.  Just gotta make sure that something like this never happens again.

Was driving home the other day and saw this on someone’s car:

Here’s a closer look:

Dude had some Spy Hunter rims.  I’m not even sure if these things are legal, but they were definitely sticking out a bunch of inches from his car.  What a show.

The stock market has been pretty crazy over the past few weeks.  I’ve mainly been liquidating my positions and raising cash because it seems as though no one really has a solid idea of which direction this market is heading over the next few months.  I’m currently holding:

• 100 AMZN @ $142.97
• 100 AMZN @ $120.85
• 100 ASEI @ $73.63
• 500 IBKR @ $16.02
• 1000 UNG @ $8.70
• 300 VCLK @ $9.70
• 300 UYM @ $29.28

Here are my realized win/loss totals at the moment:

• Account #1: +$5,440.47
• Account #2: -$94.00
• Account #3: -$3,914.21

And unrealized:

• Account #1: -$491.58

I started off the first month of the year +$10k or something like that and now I’m up about $1k YTD.  That is nubs.  Sad thing is that I knew something would go wrong after that first month, but yet I could not stop it.  It always happens.  I always give back those damn gains instead of building on the profits.

This time, it was the volatility that pummeled me.  I even had 900 shares of VXX to potect me, and shocker that I sold out of most of my VXX before the nice run-up.  Real shocker.  I think I was down $3k-$4k on the trade at one point, but then VXX went to $36 within a week.  It would’ve been a nice little profit.

Not to mention AMZN.  I got greedy up top.  I had a $3k-$4k paper profit on the puppy, but by the time I realized it, all of my profits had disappeared. What a dagger.

I tell you, if I’m not shorting the strong uptrends, then I’ll be overtrading in high volatility.  If I’m not overtrading, I am buying the strong downtrends.  Rinse and repeat.  Two or three weeks ago, I was getting in and out of AMZN like a mad man.  Every time I got in, I was like…wtf am I doing?  I felt like I was back day trading again.  Dumb.

So, I saw my trading buddy the other day at lunch.  We briefly exchanged hellos.  I haven’t really talked to him or emailed him in a while.  I’m not sure if he’s still long or what, but I don’t know…he seemed kinda reluctant to talk to me.  I’ve seen that look before.  Maybe I got a bad read on him…

Anybody been watching the World Cup?  I get cised for the World Cup.   I’ve been watching pretty much every game.  Throwing a little coin down as well…at Bodog.  I think I’m just about even right now.   I got $300 in my account, so I’ve been playing $20-$50 wagers on the games.  I’m pretty sure that the juice at Bodog is 115 for each game, which means there will be no winners.  Absolutely no chance.  Also, I’ve never really bet on soccer before, but I made the mistake of taking the moneyline in the first two games, which were draws.  Needless to say, they were both big fat LOSERS.  I also took Mirko +125 over Pat Barry in this past weekend’s UFC.  I tell you, they interviewed Crocop a few days before the fight, and the guy looked happy for the first time in a long time.  I could tell.  I don’t know if he’s “back” or not, but he definitely got over what he haunting him in his last few fights.  His best days are still behind him for sure.

Went to the doctor for my reconstructed left knee last week.  It’s been swelling up on me and just doesn’t feel right.  Some days I can barely walk without gimping.  If I straighten my leg then try to bend it…forget about it.  Hurts like hell.  Good news though.  The doc found that I have a torn lateral meniscus.  Looks kinda like this:

The above MRI is not mine, but mine kinda looks like the above.  There’s a white splotching thing in the black area where the meniscus is.  He said that the worst case scenario would put me out for 4 weeks.  Best case would be that I’d walk in a few days post-op.  Can’t wait for my knee to feel better.  I’m gonna have to blame my loss in speed and my horrible golf game on my knee.  Or maybe old age.

Alright…time to chill out before the next world cup game.  Portugal vs. italy.  Should be a good one.

• Google Adsense: $9.15
• Text link Ads: $14.50
• Intellilinks: $20.00
• Full Tilt Poker: $50.00
• Private Text Link: $200.00

I got a 12 month text link for my two blogs and blackjackcardcounter.net for $300.  Since I’m just calculating the revenue on my two blogs, I’ll divide by 3.  Also, they deactivated adsense on my old blogspot blog last month, so that small revenue stream is gone.

I was at Home Depot the other day buying some tools.  I went over to the flash light section to look for one of those cheap LED flash lights and I came across this Fenix flash light.  The stupid thing was selling for over $60.  I was like WTF?  A flash light that cost $60?  I don’t get it.  Does it fit over my junk or something and pleasure me?

I looked on Amazon, and sure enough…these damn things are definitely not cheap:

No, I am not getting one.  I only pay over $100 for kitchen knives, which I also don’t really understand…until I got one myself.

I lost $12.9k in 2008. This douchebag lost $4.9 billion euros during his stay at Societe Generale:

Rogue trader Kerviel branded “liar” in court

Makes me feel a little bit better.

Crazy that Phil Ivey bet $3 million that Dwan wouldn’t win a bracelet in this year’s WSOP:

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/poker/columns/story?columnist=wise_gary&id=5264026

Interesting read from ESPN.