Miserable week, isn’t it?

Third week’s trading turns out to be a totally nightmare for me=< soybean is down as expected, corn is also down which made my portfolio value drops from $123110.24 to $109,874.78, overall return from 23.11% to 9.87%>.< Here’s details about my portfolio summary this week.

Trade and portfolio summary:

My portfolio value ending this week is $109,874.78 (notice a loss of approx. $13000 within a week’s time!) with an overall  9.87% return and 5/24 ranking(okay, ranking’s not bad. It seems almost everybody lost their money from corn last week). So far, I brought 15 units of wheat, 10 units of maize and 5 units of soybean and shorted soybean of 5 unit. I made two transactions.First is  a sell of 3 units of maize at a price of $4.45 on Sept.30th morning which I just bought from the previous week at a price of $4.5. It turns out my last week’s decision making is somewhat wrong since I did not expect corn to suddenly drop this week.  Soybeans, without any surprise=<, kept down and gave me a negative return of  $12812. I made an impulse short of 5 units of soybeans this Monday which is absolutely a failure because I should have noticed it was not a good time to enter longterm short market for soybean as its price was low enough in the past a few weeks. Below is the detailed summary of my portfolio this week.(click to enlarge the picture)

Personal reflection & lessons learnt:

As we can see from above, this weeks’s S&P500 was a moderately upward trend, followed by mainly three downward fluctuations, and ended Friday at a slightly higher point than its opening this week. With a positive correlation between market index and future profitability, I will say the result of my portfolio did not perform well.

Why I sold corn this Monday is because I got panic when I saw corn price dropped sharply this Monday and I kept hearing bad news and predictions for its future price. I decided to sell 3 units first at that time and wait for a slightly higher price for selling more units. It turns out to be a correct decision even though I lost around $3000 on it.

For the soybeans, I was totally frustrated. I was always looking for a good price to sell them all. Tragically, I haven’t find a chance to do so till now. Hence, without giving it a second thinking, I shorted 5 units of soybeans at a price of $11.78! And right after I placed the order, I realized that it was NOT a good time to short those since the price is already low. So, the primary lesson I learnt this week was NO IMPULSE TRANSACTION just as I mentioned in my presentation this Tuesday. Yes, I paid my tuition for learning that at a cost of $4437.5, not cheap, just wanna you guys to avoid making the same mistake like me.

Highlight events this week:

1.USDA Report came out this Monday. The corn futures plunged to a 3 year low closing at 441.5 USDA boosted its inventory estimates by 25%. There are talks of corn hitting a low of almost $400 or even below! It seems I really need to find a better price to sell my 10 units of corn next week.

2.The U.S. is overtaking Russia as the world’s largest producer of oil and natural gas with U.S. imports of natural gas and crude oil have fallen 32% and 15%, respectively, in the past five years.(Attached below is the current production facts between the U.S. and Russia) This will definitely impact the oil market and there should be related fluctuations in the crop future market, well, let’s wait and see!

Strategy for the week ahead:

1.Keep calm & carry on

I really need to calm down and get rid out the frustration! It is only half way of our trading game, isn’t it? As I mentioned before, no impulse transactions and try to believe in my research results.

2. Find a good time to sell & cover

No more greedy. No one can buy at the lowest point and sell at the highest one. I will get up early next week just in case I miss any early opportunities to trade.

New resources used & found:

Speaking of the new resources found this week, I will say not too much. I was focusing on Yahoo Finance, Bloomberg and The CME Group. Sina Finance which is a Chinese website has the latest prices information for the futures as Amanda said and it is!

Can’t wait to next week’s trading…well, I actually mean SELLING!