If anyone that followed this blog in the past is still out there, I just wanted to let you guys know that I am still alive. A lot has changed in my life over the past two years with the move and change in careers, but it has been a great experience. For those of you that don’t know, I am no longer a financial advisor. I left Ameriprise Financial at the end of December 2009 and I will probably never get back in the finance industry.

I worked as an advisor for a year and four months, and although it was a struggle to keep up with paces the whole time, there were moments of triumph and excitement. I met a lot of great people and made a few friends for life. I learned a great deal about working with people and forcing yourself out of your comfort zone to get clients. When you are on the front lines in the middle of the kind of recession and market sell off that we saw, you get to observe the many ways people deal with stress and loss of capital and confidence in the system. Some people, both young and old, are calm and collected, while others will go to cash even in their 401(k) and wait until the market comes back to get back in. It is a fascinating study in human emotions.

As an advisor I didn’t have a lot of time to trade like I had hoped, and the commissions were so high that I had to hit a home run – which I had a few of – to even justify the transaction. My best trades were outlined in my post from August 2009, but let’s focus on the bad ones for now. My worst trade, and regrettably, one that I am still holding on to, was to buy VXX at $52. It is now trading just above $21.50, which is close to a 60% loss. Talk about a bad trade. Although I am down over $6,000 on this trade, and that pretty much wipes out half of my big winners, it’s not the money that bothers me. The fact that I have made the rookie mistake of holding onto my losers is quite frustrating. Despite this glaring faux pas, I am still confident that I can continue to be a successful part-time trader.

My strategy right now is to continue learning from Stewie by way of The Art of Trading subscription service and keep making cake on his calls. Stewie has done a great job in his first year of offering this trading service and he has helped me make a lot of money. You can see my review of The Art of Trading on investimonials.com.

You want to know recent results? On Monday I took Stewie’s alert on X, NETL and PEI. I exited the first two a few minutes before Stewie’s sell alert and I closed PEI right before the close instead of keeping it as an ONH. Since I am working from home most of the time, I can trade and work in tandem. Those three trades maybe took an hour out of my workday, we’ll call it my lunch break, and I came out with $878. And you thought lawyers made a lot of money per hour. Yesterday was not as successful due to stupidity on my part. I took on too much size on one trade that was my own idea. I got long 1,000 of COL at $62.73 after looking at the 30-min chart below and seeing the coiling action. I set my stop at $62.40, which was too tight, because I had too much size and couldn’t put it at $62 where it should have been. I got stopped on the sell off and ended up losing $330 on that one. I then redeemed myself by taking Stewie’s long on IVN. Again, I did not choose to swing this one and sold about 15 minutes before the close for $321 gain which nearly erased my COL mistake earlier. Lessons learned: don’t take too large of size when you can’t stand the loss at a reasonable stop level and stick with taking the alerts and stop thinking you are qualified to pick setups.