"Old times" never come back and I suppose it's just as well. What comes back is a new morning every day in the year, and that's better."
George E. Woodberry

I came from a prolonged three week vacation earlier this week with a stomach virus, and thought that I had it bad, but after looking at the market action from the last three weeks I understood that my stomachache is nothing compared to what employees of Lehman, Fannie and Freddie must have felt when their entire net worth evaporated in a matter of weeks or days...

Anyway, today's post is going to be very short- simply complete reshuffling of the MSN Strat Lab portfolio and explanation for some of it's losses to-date. First off, as anyone who has followed my MSN posts during the last year knows- I usually don't let my losses accumulate into high double digits except for one or two "conviction" picks (in this round these were intended to be CHNG and GEOY), so anyone looking at my portfolio should have been wondering what happened to my portfolio as it is simply loaded with double digit losers...

Unfortunately, MSN portfolio manager does not allow for automatic trailing stop losses and with my internet coverage being very spotty I only have had a chance to check my mail and MSN portfolio twice, so no wonder that losses accumulated quickly from 2-3% when I left to 12% when I came back...

Due to the earlier production issues several positions/trades that I intended to make last month did not go through (buying a fairly large position in ultra short emerging market ETF (EEV), solar investment in STP and selling off some of my emerging market exposure positions). But the interesting thing is that almost all of my calls from last month were right on target- emerging markets fiasco, Russia's cliff diving, energy sell off and AAPL's problems so hopefully some of the readers read them and took some corrective action on their own...

Unfortunately for the Strat Lab portfolio, I did not have a real chance to put in any trades for almost a month now, and thus the quantitative results here at MSN are quite different from the qualitative "ones"... Reading through my journal's articles, one could relatively easily figure out when some of the missed trades were intended to happen. On the other hand some of the last short trades, that I thought did not go through due to the unavailability of cash, actually did happen as it turns out and I got punished again...

All-in-all, my fund is now sitting firmly in a double digit loss position and is currently an almost certain "underdog" for the remainder of the contest...But I am not giving up as one might have had by now and intend to completely overhaul it with an intention of trying to close the gap as much as possible...

I am starting today by closing all short positions with a 2% trailing stop loss from market open and some of the losing long ones and will look to reinvest the cash into "riskier than usual" picks during the next several days... The situation in the market while illogical on the surface, is such that due to the numerous hedge funds experiencing liquidity issues, "usual short suspects" might very well be the best "short term longs" for at least a few weeks.

Stay safe out there, Vad.

More to come quite soon...