Ended up +64% for 2015. Far below highs though, due to oil collapse.

Going into year long SAFM, TDW (swapping it in for HOS for HOS so I could take loss in 2015), FSLR, and KORS. Short NFLX.

The US market continues to trade at a very high multiple...it is certainly possible there could be a crash.

Nobody can forecast a year. Those predictions are masturbatory. It is hard enough to forecast individual companies.

Tried to buy 500 contracts (50,000 shares) of 2017 Jan $0.50 calls for ARO today for $0.04, but I got rejected. If you want a long shot not bad, lady said things were flying off shelf black friday in conference call transcript at seekingalpha. They are trying closing stores and even adding new store and cutting costs. Bought 10,000 shares instead at $.28

My personal portfolio when I decided to deviate from my normal strategy: -38% for the year

The portfolio I manage for my parents which uses a stricter version of my value investing strategy: +35%

Lol to me.

Still, I am going to average down on ACW and HOS and ride them to 2018, come what may.

Impressive ramp to green on QCOM, really excited about that name this year. Strong balance sheet with plenty of potential catalysts.

Pulled the trigger on DHT, BWLD and HOS.

Didn't on ZIV yet.

fwiw I hate china short term, that market reminded me a LOT of 2000 bubble.

very long term it's probably good tho but I expect it to regress a bit in the meantime. Can't wait to be wrong here.

I really hate them, they're all mostly the same too and they're all just guesses and none of them will ever say it'll go down b/c they'd all get fired (since they're all in "invest your $ here please" things). I expect a small decline myself overall in US anyway. I will be wrong.

With people seemingly being more impatient than ever; I'd say a crash is always possible. Could simply happen from some flash crash so then it goes down a little and everyone's stop loss hits and they auto sell then people panic and sell b/c that's what they do when things start going down and so on.

What sort of time frame you looking at for HOS Brian? I figure you're just trading it as opposed to buy/hold. What's your theory on the short term movement?

It is a value play, so it should take a while to play out. Mostly bought it in case my thesis for DHT is wrong.

2015 - +22% for the year in first year of investing beyond index funds. Would have been much higher but sold all my losses in HOS for tax savings.

2016: Currently long PRSC, Nike, DIS, TDW and still have HOS in my Roth IRA. Will sell TDW and buy back into HOS once 30 days are up.

ah ok, wasn't used to you posting value things in here. Are your other picks value too?

For 2015 I ended up making around 190%. Can't really compare that result to the more passive traders around here. I'm full time researching/trading and using a decent amount of leverage. The two biggest events of 2015 for me were the flash crash and KBIO, where I was short at $2. I lost almost exactly as much on KBIO than I made on the flash crash.

I learned two things I really want to follow through on, in 2016.

Have an exit thesis. This means don't have an ambiguous stop/target, or for longer term guys, don't trim your position simply because its become too big a percent of your book. If you trim/close a position just because you are up X amount, you really skew the risk reward of your trades. This will make a huge difference across the sum of all of your trades. If you don't capitalize on your winners, you'll really feel the losers. I do a lot of backtesting and a lot of strategies perform much better if you scalp less, and let your trades breath and let the winners run. Trades where a year ago I would have taken off for a 1 pt gain, I now find myself being patient when I'm up 2 pts holding out for 3 pts.

The second is, bet really big when you have a big edge. When your edge is very big, bet big enough for it to make a difference on your bottom line. What got me thinking about it, is looking at how much heat I've taken on trades that weren't really that good of set ups, or didn't have that strong of a thesis. Your returns from your trades with large edges should dwarf returns from your trades with small edges.

Current Positions
Long CNL SLH NKA RAD

Short LEI RWLK GSI

DHT is a value-ish play, but more of a "can they grow/sustain the divy" sort of thing. I don't see much possibility of tremendous price increase with it since it is so cyclical.

BWLD isn't. It is GARP-ish minus the reasonable price bit.

I have a similiar experience. In my trading account I'm up 9.03%, my mom's IRA is up 40.31%. Almost every single trade I made in gold related instruments (long and short) I lost money, every single gold related trade (and all trades were long gold only to boot!) in my mom's IRA made money and made up ~132% of the return.

What an embarassment.

^that is a balancing act. At some point, a position does get outsized and needs to be trimmed. Obviously not at the point where you'd still call it a scalp, but when 90% of your net worth is tied up in August raw peanut futures, trimming is a really ****ing good idea.

Why make the trades at all if you think your edge is small?

You just reminded me to take another look at CVS. Thanks!

Paper losses are losses. Shouldn't matter at all whether you sold HOS or not.

Had my best year on the backs of biotech and some small caps. Wasn't tough to make it my best year because my previous year was a down one (in that bull market). Up just under 100% in one account (which only brought it back to even for the 3 year period), and about 11% in the other larger one (due mostly to the US dollar). I think the total return after fees works out to 40%. I don't expect to reproduce that, and gave myself a target of 8-10% this year.

If I had stayed away from nat gas and coffee I would have been much closer to 25% in the second account, certainly learned my lesson there. Still haven't learned entirely when to cut a loser when it comes to some holdings (certainly commodity dependent stocks), but managed to learn when to let winners run. No longer buying the open and avoiding a lot of binary situations also improved my results dramatically. Another big improvement for a newish guy like me is understanding how priced in almost all info is. I think a lot of people like me start out thinking the news they "know" isn't fully priced in, and in a few years now I've only beat the market to information twice. The goal I've got for 2016 is understanding what a realistic worst case price is for anything I buy. Certainly when I look at nat gas, I never understood the worst case, I was too busy looking how far it had dropped to understand how much farther it could go. I also really want to get better at big trend/picture scenarios. I'm just gutted that I missed the Paris/solar play, but I really wasn't trading actively in that setup. Still that's the kind of situation I think everyone in here is overqualified to catch. 2016 I want to focus on oil plays (more value), defence, a few small cap innovators, some bluechip staples on the food side, more biotech and weed here in Canada.

dont want to be that guy just posting winners, but sold the biggest winner of my life this morning with SWHC. just 2% sizing.

Nice move. Should have held in the lt folio which was my plan when originally bought at 12 ish

Decided to go short MON @ 97.40 avg plus some 95 ,95.5, 96, 96.5 that expire this friday .

so still short DNB, LNKD and now MON

Congrats dude, that is a fantastic trade. Perfect convergence of factors.

This is key! I trade only intraday so the size never gets out of hand but hanging onto the winners is most important part of my strategy. Since I trade a mechanical type system it tells me when to enter and when to exit. But even so when a trade works big and fast it is often hard not to take the large and quick profit. The problem is that the trades that have large and quick profits are usually the ones that turn into the truly exceptional trades that make your week/month/year.

The guy who said "nobody ever went broke taking a profit" never traded a breakout momentum strategy. The old adage of "cut your losers short and let your winners run" is the basis of my entire approach. If you cut the big trades, big days short because you are staring at a nice gain it will kill you in the long run.

Looking at my 2015 numbers bear this out. I didn't track individual trades but just days and weeks and months. My daily % of winning days was about 52% and winning days won twice as much as losing days lost. I don't mind flipping that coin! On a weekly basis is was about 68% winners and once again a winning week won twice what a losing week lost. On months it was 11 out of 12 winners.

Despite having these numbers in my favor there is massive variance for sure. After a string of losing days it makes taking quick profits very tempting but also the thing that will sink the ship. It's really frustrating watch a nice winner turn on a dime and go negative but you have to. It's even more frustrating to cut a trade short that would have been one of those outsized winners. If you took away my top 20 days from last year I only break even and any more and I start losing money. Those big gain days can't be dicked around with!

I decided a long time ago that I couldn't out think or out guess the market, I could only follow it with a strategy that I had calculated would work. If I try to get too smart or too cute it almost always doesn't work out. All I can do is follow my numbers and that means PATIENCE and faith in the approach.

If your system is mechanical and tells you when to enter and exit, why not just automate it and go play golf?

Not a programmer and there are sometimes situations where the market moves so fast orders don't go in correctly or at all needing manual assistance. Plus I need to manually manipulate my stops do to entry slippage. I guess that part could be programmed as well but once again I am not a programmer. And I love the markets and watching them and often scalp outside of my main approach although that isn't my main focus.

Years ago I did have it automated by a programmer in our office but even so it needed an hands on approach. But the system I trade now only trades a few times a day so its easy to do manually and I enjoy it.