Originally Posted by
Cactus
Minnow, you are very systematic and have a plan. That's good! My problem is recently I'm all over the board and don't stick with anything very long. Why? Here's my story.
I don't like investing -- never have. I only do it now because I believe I have too. I am too conservative. I was 100% in the G Fund until 2000. People at work pointed out I needed exposure to the market, so I waited for the Y2K scare to die down (remember that) and entered the C Fund in May 2000. I didn't know what I was doing. Yeah, it dropped, but I knew enough to buy-and-hold and believe in dollar-cost-averaging. Thing is I bought high and it wasn't going anywhere even after it came back. The only thing this was getting me was trying to get back up to where I started. Not much of a goal. I gave up on that in Nov 2007 and decided to go into autopilot by giving the L Fund a try for a year. That was a disaster. I put my money into L30 and watched it lose more money than I thought possible in 2008 with it's daily rebalancing. :mad:
So I gave up on that and came here and tried my hand at trading. I've been all over the place on that. Last year I tried a bit of LMBF-1 and using the RSI and bollinger bands. Thing is last year was a buy-and-hold year and the RSI remained overbought for extended periods of time. This year I've been mainly looking at support/resistance at the 50 & 200 day SMA. My problems have been what to do when my expectations aren't realized and when. I refuse to chase the market because that has burned me in the past (whipsaw), but this year that was the right thing to do here recently and last summer and back in Feb. The thing is our IFT limit doesn't give one much option. That is why I'm looking at going back to buy-and-hold next year or looking into following a trend system like LMBF. I need something where I'm not looking at the market every day because that isn't working for me. I'm my own worst enemy. CRAP proves that.
So you see I'm still not sticking to one system and that is probably what's killing me.