Go long (buying) and short (selling short) in the stock market

Every time I run a workshop, I make a distinction or rather, something that I already knew comes to the fore front of my consciousness. For example it is getting clear to me that to successfully trade the stock Stock
market you need to be going long AND short … at the same time. In other words, because market direction has such an influence on individual stocks, if you are only buying then a market move down is going to cause you problems.Sure, you have your stop loss in place so no big deal right?

Well yes but we want to be able to take advantage of the movement not just minimising losses so hedging yourself by taking a different stock in the same sector / industry and shorting it means that if the movement down occurs you are in profit, big time! This is how it works: You are long a stock with a stop loss below it. You are short another stock equally with a stop loss above it. When the movement down occurs, you are stopped out of one but the losses are limited due to your stop loss, while your gains are not limited on the other and so you can make more gains overall.

What do you think about this? I realise that this is not new, but it suddenly came to me like a blinding flash of the obvious. I am sure that this is what hedge funds do on a daily basis.

I get a lot my ideas in the shower. Therefore I can have extraordinarily long showers. I tend to look down and left so from an NLP point of view what does that mean? Down means Kinaesthetic feeling doesn’t it? Any suggestions on that one?

I started keeping a diary before I go to bed and find it is a really nice way to capture my thoughts and
Dear_diary-1 feeling for the day. It was a pain for a while but now it is just what I do. I used to keep a daily diary capturing everything throughout the day. It was something I did when I went Inter-Railing in Europe 8 times in my teen years – just going off on the train for a month. I would do things like catch the overnight train from Amsterdam to Venice just to have Italian food, and then leave again for my real destination. Anyway, back to the diary – when I was 17 my girlfriend, at the time, read it and not surprisingly confronted me with it. I was disgusted by this because I felt violated and since that time haven’t kept a diary.

I met a few people at the workshop who told me that the Tax Liens email was in a section of their in-box waiting to be read. If you are one of those people (I totally understand this by the way, I have a ‘weekend’ reading section in my in-box), then I must ask you to hurry or you will miss out. The one day tax liens seminar is this weekend Saturday 13th so please get your skates on and see if this 6 hours training won’t totally rock your world the way it did mine.

Enough said. See you there

I am writing this blog in bed in a big fluffy dressing gown. Melania was up all night, Her teeth are finally coming through and it is a tough time for her. Apparently she is in the lowest percentile in terms of weight. Mudrika is horrified. I am secretly delighted. At the last BabyJimberee class (a kind of play group for toddlers) there they had a crawling race. Melania finished before half the others even knew what was going on. She might be small compared to the size of some of the other babies in her group, but she’s fast. That’s my girl …

Until next time

Marcus