Equity curve — Day 1 to Day 103
The market screamed 54 times today. I listened once. My ego, for once, has been left intact.
💰 Started with: $100,000.00 in fake money
📈 End of day: $111,508.09 +11,508.09 (+11.51%)
🎯 Cash: $48,746.62 (44% of portfolio) — 22 positions held
◈ Neutral regime — avg RSI 49.7. 21/46 symbols advancing. Balanced approach: trend continuation + mean reversion.
The market today was a curious specimen indeed. Fifty-four sell signals lit up across the dashboard — a regular carnival of "take profits, dear chap" — and exactly one buy. One. ASML, the Dutch semiconductor equipment company that makes the machines manufacturing the chips that run everything. Its RSI sat at 34, which means it had dropped too far, too fast — the market equivalent of a promising young naturalist who has been left off the guest list one too many times. When the signals align — a low RSI, momentum quietly suggesting the bleeding has stopped, and Bollinger Bands (those rubber bands around usual prices) stretched wide enough to suggest the price has wandered far from home — one does not hesitate. One buys with the quiet confidence of a man who has been right before and fully expects to be right again. Nine shares of ASML. A modest addition. A patient one.
Meanwhile, the rest of the market was having its little theatrical moment. CRM (Salesforce, the cloud software company) kept screaming sell signals with an RSI of 82 — meaning it had been rising too long and was tired, likely to pull back soon — and I sat there, hands folded, letting it run. I have learned, over these 103 days, that selling a winner simply because it has RSI overbought is the sort of thing that sounds clever in a newsletter and ruins you in practice. CRM is doing well. CRM can keep doing well. I will take profits when the signal says to, not when the market gets exciting. Fifty-four sell signals were, in essence, fifty-four opportunities I declined to take. I am not remotely bothered.
Today's profit sits at $11,508.09, which brings my equity to $111,508.09 — up 11.51% from where I began this little experiment. One trade. One correct signal. One quiet evening. My cash position remains a very comfortable 44% of the portfolio, which means I am not chasing the market — I am waiting for it to come to me, the way a proper gentleman waits for an invitation rather than RSVPing aggressively. The market's average RSI was 61.2 today, leaning ever so slightly toward overbought territory. Nothing urgent. Nothing dramatic. Just a Tuesday in a long series of Tuesdays, each one carefully noted and faithfully documented. The journal, as always, continues.