Dump Silver

Dow Jones Index 13 September 2011 5pm (GMT+1)

Am I being too weak? I ask myself. Should I have heeded my instinct instead of waiting for silver's fall? I pulled out of a big part of my positions as the price recovered temporarily during the day, suffering a small loss. 

My finger hovered over the sell button for my index shorts before I relented. This is what this blog is meant to be about. The pain of trading. Many people have written reams on the subject of mechanical trading methods, particularly for very short term trading using margin. But I have never seen any one of them say what  they achieve by way of return on capital, year in year out. So I prefer to suffer the pain and make my judgements. My pain is caused because we are at tipping points. 

I am a bear on the indices and they have broken some support levels and bounced off others (see chart). This means that they are due for a bounce back into the channel or they have broken down and will fall massively. Don't want to miss that again.

Silver is approaching the apex of a triangle (see yesterday's chart) and could shoot out either way. Don't want to miss a rise, don't want to be clobbered by a fall. The risk here is too big so I have pulled back and hope I will be able to jump back in.

Saw stunning play last night at Theatre Royal in Bath. Three Days in May tells the story of how Churchill outmanoeuvred Lord Halifax and avoided capitulation to Hitler at the time of the surrender of France. The world would now be a very different place had he failed. Warren Clarke gave a faultless performance as Churchill which was powerful, yet restrained. Chamberlain was a broken man about to die and making a final effort to repair the damage  caused by his errors of judgement. Robert Demeger calmly conveyed his pain as Chamberlain decided to side with Churchill against Halifax, the appeaser performed by Jeremy Clyde.

This was a beautifully paced drama written by a very talented young writer Ben Brown, who was poorly acknowledged in an otherwise instructive and interesting programme. It was a play that told its story clearly and well and left the audience much better informed as well as satisfied at the end of the evening.