Q1 2007 – Keeping Score

On Feb. 27th, the day the day the Dow skidded over 400 points, my short term mechanical trading “experiment” ended. I know you’re not supposed to let the market influence your attitude or alter your plan, but it was pretty discouraging to give back several weeks of profit in one fell swoop. Just placing, and recording all those trades was taking up to two hours a day, and worth it if you're making money. But to give it all back in one day was enough to make me reconsider, and alter my strategy. After that I reverted to trading by instinct and actually closed out the quarter with healthy gains. Quarter over quarter profit came in at 8.08%, year over year gain was 28.08%. So, what has been working? Gold (Ticker: GLD), Silver (Ticker: SLV), Goldfields Inc. (Ticker: GFI), Research in Motion (Ticker: RIMM), EMC (Ticker: EMC), Mastercard (Ticker: MA), Yamana Gold (Ticker: AUY), and Digene Corp (Ticker: DIGE). I recently took a “buy and hold” position in Bowater Inc. (Ticker: BOW) based on an article in Barron’s that made a good case for a multi-year upswing in profits.