#jaroquits trading ... after almost 7 years of almost daily effort ... and RESTARTS again ;-)

... for a time :-)

an empty account :-)

folks, ive sold my remaining micro trading positions orange juice + natural gas 2day (thursday) and withdrawn all money out of my trading account ... hell, what does it mean? well, my trading career is after almost 7 years over ... at least for a time :-) 

what abt my YTD and/or overall balance? well, ive started the year with 7,267 €uros and ended up with 13,265 on july 21th (ie withdrawn 9,000 and closed with 4,265 €). its a nice performance of 82.54% in 7 months, thats fine, of course ;-). nevertheless, im disappointed cos ive lost 4,000 €uros (or 55% in terms of performance) in 4 days in june basically on own overestimation + stupidity (more details below ~ 'lake garda'). well, im too lazy to look at my old statistics and even not sure if i would find all of them today, so i just can tell ya that my best trading year was 2010 with a profit of 347% and that ive made 31% in 2009  ... anyway, it was a succesful period in terms of $$ + experience in my life, so why to quit? many reasons out there:

• the commodity exchanges changed their rules according margin requirements (eg in case of silver is the margin 8 times higher as it used to be in january (it is an increase by 700% my dear!), in case of wheat 3.33 times higher etc => i would need much much much more money deposited at my brokers account in order to hold the same line of stuff as usually
• new rules require a new strategy (stop loss limits etc) which doesnt fit my personality i think
• ive lost half my trading account in 4 days while at lake garda in italy ... leaving my account without stop limits + facing a real drawndown in commodities in that time + didnt look-up the results in the evenings => a sad combination of bad strategy & bad luck ... btw, i hope u did learn a lot by reading this lines without losing any money, didnt u?
• my intuition told me the mining stocks market was/is close to its bottom => i liked to invest more $$ in mining stocks, so ive been looking for some fresh money 2 invest. cos there was no money in my wifes/childrens piggy banks at all (did they hide it somewhere else?) i decided to use my trading funds for that reason :-)
• i have no time/energy to think abt new trades and/or strategy cos of my current 10 hours a day office job
• my broker plans to close its old trading platform and to force all traders to switch to the new one ... i would rather switch to different broker cos of the sometimes really strange order executions instead, but there is the well known 'no time' issue again ...
• im prolly even a little bit tired after sooo many years of almost daily connection to worlds financial markets 
• trading 'costs' me too much time + attention which is missing for other things in life
• there is still my mining stocks account :-)
• etc etc etc

whats next? well, i have moved the remaining 4,265 €uros of my trading money to my investing account and heavily invested in mining stocks. cos the investing account is also a margin account and my 'old' mining stocks advanced like crazy the last 2 or 3 weeks, i could buy mining stocks for approx 11,000 €uros in july and going to add few more soon ... hell, hell, hell!! good luck, my dear stock market plays, good luck 

btw, is there any strategy in my stock market investing? till now only my old 'buy-and-hold' idea but im going to think abt a more sophisticated one on the weekend, promised!

my stock market strategy, is that YOU? well, i still believe we are in a hyper-inflationary phase, so it makes not much sense 2 sell commodity stocks, i think ... and there is also that stupid 28.x% tax on profits in germany.... buuuut also commodity stocks can go down a lot and they also did from april to june (approx 30% i woudda say), so what to do if my broker asks for more money to cover my current line of stocks? well, then and only then im going to sell stocks of companies which were performing badly or have imo limited potential for future (price) growth or both! lets write down few of them immediately and increase that list as time goes on in order to have one place of easy access when it is time to lower my stock market exposure quickly:

• kinross gold
• detour gold
• gold fields
• brent oil call warrant (strike price 90 usd, expires in november 2011 anyway)
• silver standard resources
• yamana gold
• sultan corp.
• osisko mining
• barrick gold
• jaguar mining
• clifton star resources
• legend intnl holdings
• microsoft ... lets hope they're going to pay out their surplus cash (above $20b i think) to shareholders first 
• MAN
• archer daniels midland
• agrium inc
• penn west petroleum
• ...