My only saving grace is that near the end of the night, I reloaded to almost $500 and decided to play 9-3 hearts from the button after the small blind raised it to $25.  It was headsup, just him and me.  Flop came A-9-4 with one heart.  He lead out for $40, I called, thinking that I had some outs.  Queen of hearts came on the turn giving me a flush draw.  He bet out $120 and I called instantly with another $270 behind me.  River brought a 7 of hearts giving me the flush.  He checked and I pushed.  He didn’t give it much thought with his trip Aces and called.  I showed my runner-runner flush and he looked like he wanted to shoot me.

With that hand, I was able to minimize the damage and only lose $76 on the night.  Not too bad.  I decided not to push my luck any further and called it a night around 2am.  I’ll be back though.  Hopefully with a win next time.

One hand, I got bluffed the F out by some donkey who kept talking throughout the entire game.  He was sitting right next to me.  I had A-9 and the flop was A-A-8.  He check min-raised the preflop raiser from $25 to $50.  I just called both times with my trip Aces.  The turn brought a Q.  I checked and he went all-in for about $450.  I started talking to him and he kept telling me not to call because he “had me beat”.  I was trying to put all of the pieces together thinking that the only hand he could have is A-8.  I was pretty close to calling when he decided to open one of his cards…an 8.  That killed me because I really didn’t want to see that card.  I mucked and he a 9 as his other card.  Doh!  It’s always a little annoying getting bluffed.  One thing that I learned from this bluff is that when players show their cards before the hand is over, they’re almost ALWAYS bluffing.  It’s happened to me a few times already, so next time, if I’m 50/50 on a decision, and the donkey shows me his card, I’m gonna call.

I just dumped my 800 UCO at $9.01 which I bought at $9.23.  I’m going into hibernation mode here.  I had a brief talk with my trading buddy on Sunday at a BBQ.  He said that he thinks this market will chop around for the next month or so, then go higher.  He’s still expecting a very large decline starting closer to the end of the year which is also what The Fly is thinking.  So, my buddy is expecting to get back on the long side near the second week of October.  I’ll be trading lightly until then.

One thing that I’m starting to realize about these “good traders” is that they really do look at all of the different markets/sectors, and based their predictions on all of those factors.  My trading buddy was telling me about the housing market, and the bond market, and yadda, yadda, yadda….I mean, I rarely look at anything, but my damn charts.  I remember reading an article over at http://traderfeed.blogspot.com/, and the doctor drew comparisons between the good traders and the bad ones.  On the list for the good traders, he mentioned that almost all of them make their predictions based on all of the different markets that make the stock market, as a whole, go up and down.

Anyways, I guess what I’m getting at is that I need to know more.  I can’t just keep looking at these charts thinking that they are the end all, be all.  I really need to know what are the driving factors of today’s market, and why.  Understand the relationships between all of the different markets, and not just the one that I see in front of me.  I can still use my charts, but only as a reference point along with other reference points.

Alright, time to finish watching Little People, Big World.  Don’t sleep on that show.

Gonna sit tight here.  The market has been pretty volatile over the past few months.  Up and down, up and down, these swings will kill you if you don’t time them right.  My guess is that we go higher from here because there are a few tickers that I watch, that still need to touch their 38.2% retracement levels on the upside.  Then, maybe a bigger decline after.

I just added 100 shares of VXX here.  Scaling in.  I’m probably wrong by buying here, but it’s only 100 shares.  I’ll add more if the market continues to march higher.

Heading up to Charles Town for an 8th time today.  If you don’t hear from me next week, then I probably lost.  Probably gonna put in a long session, so anything can happen.  We’ll see how it goes.  Gonna see if I can download some movies to put on my iphone so that I can watch them while playing.  Silly…

In addition to my current longs,  I added 800 shares of UCO at $9.23.  Who knows where this market is going over the next few weeks, but I will follow my senses and my sources because that’s what’s been working.

That’s about it for now.  I’m starting to like this Macbook Pro.  I took it to starbucks today to do some work and forgot my mouse.  I still have a lot of learning to do with the trackpad, but it can pretty much do everything with one hand and 5 fingers.  Still learning the little tricks here and there, but I’m getting it.  It’s so damn light too.  Apple is going to rule the world in the few years, for sure.  I will most likely get the next generation ipad when it comes out too…

I’ve been giving free (or cheap) cards lately in hopes of reducing my swings.  Even if I push there, on the turn, I only had about $250-300 behind me…I don’t think it would’ve been too bad of call for him.  Instead I opted to wait to see the river before putting my money in the middle.  I don’t know if what I did was “correct” or not, but I ended up losing the hand.  The thing is, I only lost about $100 versus my entire stack, if I pushed and he called on the turn.

Considering that I’m about an 80% favorite to win the pot with one card to come, assuming that one of them was on a flush draw, with a 50% chance that one of them might call the push on the turn…I’m really not sure if it was correct to push there or not.  Maybe if I had a bigger stack, then it’d correct to kill their odds.  I don’t know.

Anyways, I ended up winning a lot of smaller pots on Sunday.  When I left, I counted $847 in profits.  I guess a lot of smaller pots added up.

That puts my profits over the past 7 sessions at Charles Town to over $4k.  Every time I go up, I’m like…I can’t keep winning like this.  Anyways, I am prepared for the downturn.

So, I went to Microcenter on Monday to get a Macbook Pro.  I decided to get a cheap one…the cheapest actually.  I got a 13″ 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo.  Costed me $1,050 out the door.  It took me a few days to get everything working on it, but it’s pretty damn nice so far.  I got this program called Parallels installed, and it allows me to install all of the windows apps that I need.  The good thing about Parallels is that I don’t have to run this thing in a separate window.  I can use “coherence” mode and everything gets integrated in OS X.  I can run Quotetracker just like it was a Mac app.  Pretty damn cool.  There’s only a handful of apps that Mac doesn’t support anyways, so it’s not that big of a deal.

My only gripe right now is that the screen is too damn small.  I went from a 16″ with 1920 x 1280 to a 13″ 1280 x 800, which is nubs.  I probably should’ve gotten the 15″ for $600-$700 more, but I didn’t know if I’d even like the Macbook or not.  I’m starting to like it though.  It was pretty easy to setup.  And the thing is so damn light…hasn’t gotten hot like my HP yet.  The touchpad is pretty silly too.  You can use multiple fingers to do different things.  Not sure why the windows laptops don’t use this technology.  Maybe they do and I just don’t know it.

Anyways, I see myself getting a bigger and faster Macbook pro within a year.  I’ll probably get the iPad too, when a new version comes out.  I think with this new Macbook Pro, I might just be converted into a full-on Mac person…..eeek.

Onto the market.  I am still long (and up until today), very wrong.  Unfortunately, I got in on most of my longs above the current market price, so I’m still down on those trades.  Up 3%-5% on all longs  across the board today though, which is sick.  I’m probably going to lighten my load tomorrow.  Definitely sell most, if not all, of my double long index ETFs (SSO, DDM, QLD).  Probably gonna unload my UYM as well.  My natural gas ETF is my only big loss right now.  Down about $2.4k on that one…I got 1500 shares above 8.  That’s about it for now.  Just gonna lighten my load starting tomorrow, then we’ll see what happens from here…  we’ll see…

Still contemplating buying that Macbook Pro.  It makes it a little bit easier to justify now, since the nice asian man from last night decided to donate to the cause.  If it weren’t for the older, but very aggressive asian lady who put me all in with top two pairs, and stole $250 from me… I probably would’ve ordered the Macbook Pro by now.  I was definitely up closer to $1,400 before that last hand of the night.

This HP HDX16t that I have is a 2.53Ghz Core 2 Duo, which I read is equivalent to the 2.4 Ghz Core i5 in the 15″ Macbook Pro.  Uggh…I don’t really need a new laptop.  If I got a new one, I’ll probably just use this HP as a coaster, which bothers me a little bit.  Maybe I’ll just buy an iPad and call it a day.  It’ll be much easier to peel off 6 large ones versus 22 large ones.  Tough decisions.

Hero: AQ offsuit

I raised it to $25 preflop in position with two players in front of me.  Flop came 5-5-9 rainbow.  The two players checked and I bet out small for $25.  Both players called.  King came on the turn.  Both players checked and I bet out $75.  One player called.  River is a Ten.  Player leads out for $50 into a $300 pot.  I immediately put him on a KJ, Kx type hand.  Up until this point, I barely played any hands, so I’m pretty sure that dude thought that I was tighter than usual, especially since he had played more than 50% of the hands.  I had just sat down at the table.  I thought for a few seconds and announced all in for $230 total.  I rarely bluff like this, but I felt as though he would lay down his KJ to my big bet like this.  He thought for a long ass time, and finally pushed his chips in.  Dagger.

So, I was stuck $300 just like that.  I grinded back for the next few hours, very card dead, but I was able to get back to even.  Near 2am (we got there at around 7:30pm), I was pretty much breakeven.  I had been playing with this dude next to me the entire time.  I had TJ suited and limped in from position.  My opponent was in the small blind and reraised to $40 pre-flop.  Everybody folded and I decided to call because we both had about $600-$700 in front of us.  I felt as though I had a good read on him anyways, especially with my position.  The flop came 8-8-9, two clubs.  I had hearts, but with the flop, I had an open ended straight draw.  He immediately lead out for $60 into a $100 pot.  I put him on a bigger pair.  I was just hoping that it wasn’t Queens, which would kill two of my outs.  I decided to call, since I’ve seen him shut down on the turn with a big hand before and he kinda priced me in for $60, especially if I might get two cards instead of one.  The turn brought a 7 of clubs, putting three clubs on the board, but also giving me a straight.  He checked immediately, and I thought for a minute and bet out $200.  He immediately called.  At that point, I knew he didn’t have a flush and definitely  just a big pair; maybe a backdoor flush draw.  Another 7 came on the river and he insta-bet $200.  I had about $350 behind me.  I knew I had him beat, but I just couldn’t push all-in there, since I’d only be called with a better hand.  Although, I did think about raising, just so that he’d have to pay to see my cards.  I called, and turned over the straight, taking the $500+ pot.

I ended up winning $533 with that last pot.  It was pretty sick, since I was card dead the entire night.  Now I’m 5 for 5 at Charles Town.  Probably planning on heading back up there sometime within the next week.

Onto the market.  So, I’m in a little bit of a bind here.  I sold/covered all of my shorts last week and went long via SSO, DDM and QLD.  The market has been pummeled since then.  I put about $60k to work, and now that $60k is looking a little more like $55k.  Doh!  I’m gonna wait it out here.  I should’ve kept my VXX and FAZ, but I didn’t.  The only good news is that the McClellan Oscillator is nearing the -200 mark, which usually marks a break to the downside.  I swear, every time I load up, I’m on the wrong side of the trade.  Not sure how many times I gotta tell myself to scale into positions because I’m always wrong on the entries.  Ughhh.

So, I sold my iPhone 3GS, Mac Mini, and this portable A/C unit that was sitting my closet for about 5 years now.  $325, $330, and $200 respectively.  Sold them all on Craigslist within a week.  I hate meeting people to sell these things because people always try to bargain when they see the item.  Actually, the only one that bargained was the iPhone 3GS dude.  He wanted it for $300, when I had already lowered the price from $350.  I should’ve kicked him in the butthole.

I’ve been thinking about buying a Macbook Pro.  I don’t really need one, but this HP HDX16t is killing me.  I paid $1500 for the damn thing in February 2009.  It’s about a year and a half old.  It still runs pretty well, except it gets so hot and it’s so damn loud when the fan is running out of control.  I’ve already had to replace the extended battery on this fucker too.  And the thing is falling apart.  Take a look:

One of my buttons got sucked up by the vacuum

One of the end pieces fell off already.  No clue what happened to it.

I’m never getting an HP ever again.  My next laptop will definitely be a MacBook Pro.  It’s just a matter of when I get it.  They’re offering a education discount right now on all Macbooks, including a fee 8GB ipod touch.  I imagine that if I get one now, I can probably hawk the iPod touch for about $150.  I’m just trying to justify buying a new laptop even though I don’t really need one.  I still have my old Dell D810 sitting on the sidelines.  It’s only worth about $250 though, so there’s no point in even trying to sell it.  If I buy the new Macbook, I’d probably have to run one of the Windows emulators on it because I need some of these windows apps, like quotetracker.  Pretty much everything else, I should be good to go though…

I think I might just do it and write that sucker off as a business expense.  Hah.  It still comes from my income, but it’d be a few hundred less in taxes that I’d have to pay.

Today, I am 14 days off of my meniscus surgery.  I actually played my first round of golf 5 days after surgery.  Since then, I’ve played 4 more rounds, so as you can, it really wasn’t that bad.  I went in for my post-op checkup last friday and the doc told me what he did.  Here’s a picture:

Basically, there was a tear on the inside portion of my meniscus.  A small tear, similar to this:

They cut away the damaged tissue.  My knee joint from my thigh bone also had some trauma, due to the tear, so he smoothed it out by shaving it down a little.  It definitely doesn’t feel 100% again.  As a matter of fact, I can’t tell much of a difference.  The outside portion of my knee still hurts a little and it’s definitely still swollen.  I don’t think that it’ll ever feel the same again.  My LCL is still a problem, which most likely will never be fixed.  Ughhh.  Maybe I haven’t given it enough time yet.  I also hope for the instant fix, but things don’t work that way.  I’ll reassess in a few weeks.

I’m out.

So, I put this queen sized bed metal bed frame on craigslist the other day for $20.  This girl emails me and ask me if I’d take $15 for the damn thing.  I said alright…my time is not worth the extra $5 and I wasn’t getting a lot of takers on this bed frame, so I said alright.  Well, she shows up today to pick it up with some dude in a toyota celica, nicely dressed, and what looked like a nice watch.  She comes up and I show her the bed frame.  The dude chimes in saying that a piece is a missing.  The bitch had the nerve to ask me if I’d “take $10 for it”.  I gave him a big Pffffttt.  I wanted to tell him to suck it.  Seriously, $5 is not worth my time, but I don’t like hagglers who get a deal and want a better deal at pay-up time.  I should’ve told them to leave, and that I’d sell it to someone else.  I mean, come on.  Homey don’t play that shit.

I’m five days post op from my meniscus surgery.  Apparently, he just removed a part of my meniscus, which requires a lot less recovery time.  I read that a football player played in a game 3 days after his surgery; a baseball player 10 days after surgery.  Well, I still have three stitches on my knee, but it really does feel great, so I played some golf today.  Even shot an 88.  It’s a little swollen, but I’m pretty sure that I’ll be back in business in a few days.  I like it.  I hope that it’ll eventually feel better than how it felt before.

Anyways, the surgery was simple.  After I got home, I took a 2 hour nap and I’m good to go now.  No real pain.  I can walk without crutches.  Just a bandage over my knee.  Ice every 20 minutes for the next 48 hours.  I imagine that I’ll be back on the soccer field in 2-3 weeks.  Golf in 2 weeks.

That’s how I feel now.  Not sure about how I’ll feel after the medicine wears off.  Hah.

So, I dumped out of my UYM about a week ago for a small loss.  Can’t remember exactly how much, but I didn’t want to deal with it any more, since I wanted to position myself more for the downside than the upside.  Yesterday, I started positioning myself for the downside by buying:

• Short 150 BBY @ $34.50
• Short 200 SBUX @ $25.29
• Long 300 FAZ @ $13.68

The timing was pretty good as the dow is down 260 today.  I have a feeling that we’re not done to the upside just yet though.  I looked at some charts and normally we’ll see a retest of the recent highs before heading lower.  So, anyways, I’m just gonna scale in here.  Scaling in has worked a hell of the lot better for me than buying in bulk.  I’m not good enough to buy my entire position at the top or bottom.

I will be adding to my shorts over the next few weeks.

So, my 2006 Jeep Commander has been giving some minor problems.  Well maybe not so minor.  On my road trip to Ohio/Chicago/Madison, the car stalled a few times while going less than 5MPH.  Twice on the highway.  Not good.  Apparently, it’s a known problem.  I brought my car into the dealership and they told me that my car was not eligible for the recall.  Dagger.

It’s not a huge deal to me now because it seems to only happen when I’ve been driving the car for a long period of time, and the car is going less than 5MPH.  Problem is, I need to put the car into the Park position and put the key into the off position and restart the car.  If I’m on the highway, this doesn’t work too well.  More annoying than anything.

I’ve read that people have had this happen while driving 70MPH.  that would not be good for me.  Hopefully, that never happens to me.

I’m thinking about returning my iPhone 4.  I’d rather have the iPhone 4 on the verizon network.  Supposedly, it’s coming to verizon in January.  Just rumors though.  The only good thing about AT&T is that I can use voice and data at the same time, whereas with Verizon, I can’t do that.  It’s really not that big of an issue because I don’t use tethering of my phone that much these days.  if I had a choice, I’d choose the better voice service in Verizon any day.  I’d be up for a renewal in July 2011 if I returned my iphone 4.  Not sure if I’ll do it though as I’ve had pretty good reception with AT&T after the switch to the iPhone 4.

That’s about it for now.  Gonna sit tight for the next few days and wait for this market to tell me where it wants to go.  We may have a spike to the downside, then a retest of these recent highs over the next two weeks.  I’ll be watching for that.

I wanted Sonnen to win, but the truth is, Silva is a much more exciting fighter and I’d rather see him defend his belt than Sonnen.

What a great card though.  I missed the Roy Nelson vs. Dos Santos, but I’m gonna try to catch it on replay.  It was good to see Matt Hughes get another victory.  I think his best days are behind him, but he put on a good show.

I think it’s safe to say that GSP vs. Anderson Silva would be a no contest at this point.  No chance Silva would be able to GSP who has a more solid wrestling background.

Good stuff.  Next up, Penn vs. Edgar II at UFC 118 on August 28th.

I was supposed to “scale in” from here on out, but I got a little greedy on this trade.  All good.

So I emailed my trading buddy yesterday and here’s what he said:

“I think it may push higher to 1140s-1150s by next week or so then it will dip lower from here in next two ot three months. Maybe low 900s.”

Seems to coincide with what The Fly is thinking as well, so let’s just go with it.  I will add to my VXX position lower.  Maybe get a few other short ETFs.

Here’s what I’m holding now:

• 100 AMZN @ $142.97
• 100 ASEI @ $73.63
• 500 IBKR @ $16.02
• 1000 UNG @ $8.70
• 300 VCLK @ $9.70
• 300 VCLK @ $11.20
• 300 VXX @ $23.88
• 500 UYM at $30.14

Went up to Charles Town Races & Slots last Thursday.  Third time for me now.  It only took about 30 minutes to get onto a table this time.  Things are getting much better up there.  I played $2/$5 NL the entire night.  Was up about $700, until I flopped top two and some lady flopped bottom set.  I called the whole way and probably lost the minimum.  I should’ve folded though as I was about 80% certain that she had a set of deuces.  F me.

In another hand, I lost with a lower flush (8-9 suited).  I tell you what, if you hit a lower flush, be careful!  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve lost a good amount of money to a higher flush.  Next time, I will be a lot more cautious.

Anyways, I ended up winning about $200.  I’ve won 3 out of 3 times now for about $800 total.  Kinda nubs for the amount of hours that I played…probably about 16-20 hours total.

My golf game.  Still putting in a lot of rounds this year.  Just not writing about it as much.  My handicap is near it’s low again at 13.0.  I have my good days and my bad days.  One of my biggest problems has been laterally shifting instead of turning.  When I turn, instead of shift, I hit a lot more solid shots instead of the fat/thin shots.  Try it out some time.  I recently changed putters too, to an old blade that I have.  It’s help me a little bit.  Watched Mickelson’s short game dvd again too.  That thing is golden.  I’d recommend bit torrenting that bitch if you’re a golfer…

Taking a road trip today in my silly Jeep Commander.  Ohio, Chicago, then Madison.  I think it takes about 14 hours from DC to Madison, so it’s going to be a long one.  Lots of coffee and lots of pee breaks.  I’ve never really been to chicago before, so that should be a fun one.  Madison, WI…I will buy some cheese.

I got the new iPhone 4 a couple of days ago.  I was waiting for the white one, but it’s been delayed til the “end of the year”.  F that.  The iphone 4 is not that much different than my 3gs.  The resolution and battery life are noticeably better, but is it really worth the upgrade?  Not really, but I need to have the latest and greatest.  Facetime is pretty silly too.  However, I don’t envision facetiming one of my buddies any time soon because I don’t want to see someone’s face when I’m talking to them on the phone.  Seriously.  “Oh you got something on your face…did I get it…no, on that side…ok, you got it now”. Seriously.  My conversations are normally, “you want to golf…yes…ok, 2:15 tee time…cya”.

Alright…time to roll.  No golf for about two weeks…what a dagger.  Gotta drop the dog off at Dogtopia first.  Lots of randomness, I know.  I’m out.

I have three accounts with Ameritrade and a fourth unused account, which I used to daytrade in back in the days, until I discovered IB.  But now, I’m going back to Amertirade.  I just wanted to consolidate all of my accounts, instead of logging into two separate systems.  And now that I can use thinkorswim, I pretty much have everything I need through Ameritrade.

This thinkorswim platform is pretty nice too.  It’s continuous futures charts, which IB didn’t have.  And now, I have my McClellan Oscillator back as they have ProphetCharts integrated into their platform.  I’ve only been using it for the past two days, but from what I’ve played with, it can pretty much do everything I want it to do.

I love the charts too.  It’s so much faster than IB’s clunky java charts, which I NEVER used.  I also noticed that there is an option for “real time” quotes too, instead of a max 2-second delayed quotes from IB.  Not that it makes a huge difference to me, but it’s nice to see every trade and size instead of the delayed quotes which may sometimes be clumped together with other trades.  I think that’s how it works.

Now, here’s the kicker.  There’s always a kicker.  Thinkorswim charges $3.50 per contract one-way.  Yes, that $7 per round-trip trade.  Eeek.  Yes, that’s a lot.  In comparison, IB charges $1.14 per contract on the major index futures.  Honestly, I don’t trade that much futures these days anyways, so it’s no biggie for me.  And if I do trade, it will be multi-day or multi-week, not day trades, like I used to do.  So, this will work for me.  Definitely, more for the casual trader versus the daily trader.

Also, I think if I talked to my Ameritrade rep, he’d probably be able to hook me up with some sort of commissions discount.

What else…I sold my 300 shares of UYM for -$1k.  This stupid ETF owns me.  I bought at $29.30 and sold at $25.90.  I am back in again at $24.10 as of yesterday.  300 shares.  Definitely net down on this fucker.  I was seriously contemplating deleting the ticker from my watchlist, but I am a stubborn mofo and I will try to get it back, or maybe lose a lot of money in the process.

I also dumped 100 shares of AMZN near $112 for -$870 or so.  I am back in 200 shares at $110.26.  I have 300 shares total now.  The other 100 shares were bought in the $142s…doh!  I’m just trying to average down a little bit, as that 100 shares is meant to be for the longer term.

Here’s what I’m holding now:

• 100 AMZN @ $142.97
• 100 ASEI @ $73.63
• 500 IBKR @ $16.02
• 1000 UNG @ $8.70
• 300 VCLK @ $9.70
• 300 UYM @ $24.10
• 200 AMZN @ $110.26

Nothing big.  For the year, I think I am up a few Gs.  Ugghh.  Making money in the stock market may be worse of a grind than playing poker.  Anyways, I am going to tread carefully over the next few months and hopefully end the year with a nice gain.

Yesterday, the poker room was only open from 8pm until 4am.  We didn’t get there until about 8pm.  By the time we got our names on the list, there were already 80 people in front of us on the $1/$2 NL list, about 40 on the $2/$5 NL list.  Pretty crazy.  They only opened 10 tables, 4 tables for $1/$2 and 2 tables for $2/$5 and the rest were $3/6 Limit, $5/$10 NL, and $10/$20 limit.  Took me 2 hours to get on a $3/$6 limit table, and almost 3 hours to get on a $2/$5 NL table.  It probably would’ve taken 4 hours to get on the $1/$2 NL table, but I didn’t wait long enough for that one.

Supposedly, they don’t have enough dealers licensed to deal, which is why they only have 10 of the 27 tables open.  By Friday, all of the tables should available…so they say.  And I think they’re going to be extending the operating hours by Friday.  Of course, I’m getting all of this from 2+2.

Overall, the place is pretty damn nice.  I was pleasantly surprised.  I was thinking riverboat, dungy and dirty type, but the place was actually pretty nice.  And the drive up there wasn’t too bad.  Took me about 50 minutes.

It takes a few days to make each knife.  How much?  The cool price of $1,499.95.  I might have to get me one.

Took my dog for a walk today and he ended up rolling around in some poo.  And I’m pretty sure it wasn’t dog poo.  Bum poo.  Absolutely disgusting, considering that I had to bathe him afterwards.  A dung beetle was attached.

Went to Mexico two months ago and turned on my iphone just to see if it would work.  It downloaded all of my emails, then I turned it back off.

Checked my bill the other day and they charged me $17.47 for downloading one batch of emails.  Dagger.

AMZN is down $11 today or 10%.  I had 200 shares as of this morning.  Sold out of 100 shares near $111.  Still a dagger though.

Only good news is that I bought 500 shares of VXX near $25.86 to hedge my murdered longs.  It gets me back $2.6k, but still down about $4k from my highs at the gap last Monday.

Normally, I can just run AVG/Malwarebytes/SuperAntiSpyware to remove the trojan, but this time it didn’t quite work.  I look through all of  the “run” keys in my registry and deleted a some weird key that kept adding itself.  It was weird because it looked like it was trying to run an AVI movie file with VLC, my video program.  I’m guessing that this program was the culprit because I’ve never seen a video trojan before, but this thing was definitely running an AVI file.

Anyways, after removing the AVI file, I was still having the same problem.  I posted on Techsupportforum.com (this free support website is SILLY).  They just responded this morning.  Fortunately, I found the culprit last night.  Looks like my hosts file was modified, so that when I went to google/bing/yahoo, I was actually visiting a fake clone website.   Here’s the infected hosts file:

89.149.193.132 www.google.com
89.149.193.132 us.search.yahoo.com
89.149.193.132 uk.search.yahoo.com
89.149.193.132 search.yahoo.com
89.149.193.132 www.google.com.br
89.149.193.132 www.google.it
89.149.193.132 www.google.es
89.149.193.132 www.google.co.jp
89.149.193.132 www.google.com.mx
89.149.193.132 www.google.ca
89.149.193.132 www.google.com.au
89.149.193.132 www.google.nl
89.149.193.132 www.google.co.za
89.149.193.132 www.google.be
89.149.193.132 www.google.gr
89.149.193.132 www.google.at
89.149.193.132 www.google.se
89.149.193.132 www.google.ch
89.149.193.132 www.google.pt
89.149.193.132 www.google.dk
89.149.193.132 www.google.fi
89.149.193.132 www.google.ie
89.149.193.132 www.google.no
89.149.193.132 www.google.de
89.149.193.132 www.google.fr
89.149.193.132 www.google.co.uk
89.149.193.132 www.bing.com

Made sense because the problem affected all browsers.  The search pages looked exactly the same and everything.  The only difference was the fact that the signin and igoogle links showed up, when they normally don’t show up.  Here’s a screen capture:

I readded the ip addresss to my hosts file as infected.google.com just to see the infected website again.  I hope I didn’t try to login to my gmail account because if I did, they’d have my password now.  I’m pretty sure that I didn’t though.

I just updated my version of VLC from 1.0.5 to 1.1.0.  Hopefully this will fix the problem for next time.

With my dog still outside, the elevator proceeded to go up to the third floor.  My flexi-leash is 16 feet long.  In the split second, I knew it would be close.  As I got higher, the tension on the flexi-leash got tighter.  Finally, it was rigid with no room slack.  I heard my dog yelping below.  Nothing I could do.  After I got to the third floor, I quickly pushed the lobby button and the elevator felt like it took forever to get back down there.  By this time, the leash had pulled so tight to the elevator door that I knew he was in trouble.

As I got back down to the lobby, the doors opened and there were a bunch of people there.  One was holding the dog and the other was had the leash unhooked.  Wow.  F me.  My dog had shit and pissed everywhere in terror.  The dudes said that they heard the dog yelping and they quickly unhooked him.

I got lucky.

This story could very well have ended badly.  I really did get lucky.  First off, I was on the third floor, so I think the leash length was actually just enough, so that the leash took him about 3/4s of the way up the door.  Secondly, two guys below were standing near the lobby elevators and reacted quickly.  It was a scene straight from the horror movies, except I was part of it.  The whole thing probably lasted no more than 30 seconds.

I checked the elevator and there is no emergency stop button.  And there’s no way that I would’ve been able to break the leash off with my bare hands.  Also, if I would’ve pull the leash to try to break it, I would’ve been pulling on his neck.  That wouldn’t have worked.  That was scary though.

Luckily it ended well, but it shouldn’t have happened in the first place.  Can’t dwell on it though.  Just gotta make sure that something like this never happens again.

Here’s a closer look:

Dude had some Spy Hunter rims.  I’m not even sure if these things are legal, but they were definitely sticking out a bunch of inches from his car.  What a show.

• 100 AMZN @ $142.97
• 100 AMZN @ $120.85
• 100 ASEI @ $73.63
• 500 IBKR @ $16.02
• 1000 UNG @ $8.70
• 300 VCLK @ $9.70
• 300 UYM @ $29.28

Here are my realized win/loss totals at the moment:

• Account #1: +$5,440.47
• Account #2: -$94.00
• Account #3: -$3,914.21

And unrealized:

• Account #1: -$491.58

I started off the first month of the year +$10k or something like that and now I’m up about $1k YTD.  That is nubs.  Sad thing is that I knew something would go wrong after that first month, but yet I could not stop it.  It always happens.  I always give back those damn gains instead of building on the profits.

This time, it was the volatility that pummeled me.  I even had 900 shares of VXX to potect me, and shocker that I sold out of most of my VXX before the nice run-up.  Real shocker.  I think I was down $3k-$4k on the trade at one point, but then VXX went to $36 within a week.  It would’ve been a nice little profit.

Not to mention AMZN.  I got greedy up top.  I had a $3k-$4k paper profit on the puppy, but by the time I realized it, all of my profits had disappeared. What a dagger.

I tell you, if I’m not shorting the strong uptrends, then I’ll be overtrading in high volatility.  If I’m not overtrading, I am buying the strong downtrends.  Rinse and repeat.  Two or three weeks ago, I was getting in and out of AMZN like a mad man.  Every time I got in, I was like…wtf am I doing?  I felt like I was back day trading again.  Dumb.

So, I saw my trading buddy the other day at lunch.  We briefly exchanged hellos.  I haven’t really talked to him or emailed him in a while.  I’m not sure if he’s still long or what, but I don’t know…he seemed kinda reluctant to talk to me.  I’ve seen that look before.  Maybe I got a bad read on him…

Anybody been watching the World Cup?  I get cised for the World Cup.   I’ve been watching pretty much every game.  Throwing a little coin down as well…at Bodog.  I think I’m just about even right now.   I got $300 in my account, so I’ve been playing $20-$50 wagers on the games.  I’m pretty sure that the juice at Bodog is 115 for each game, which means there will be no winners.  Absolutely no chance.  Also, I’ve never really bet on soccer before, but I made the mistake of taking the moneyline in the first two games, which were draws.  Needless to say, they were both big fat LOSERS.  I also took Mirko +125 over Pat Barry in this past weekend’s UFC.  I tell you, they interviewed Crocop a few days before the fight, and the guy looked happy for the first time in a long time.  I could tell.  I don’t know if he’s “back” or not, but he definitely got over what he haunting him in his last few fights.  His best days are still behind him for sure.

Went to the doctor for my reconstructed left knee last week.  It’s been swelling up on me and just doesn’t feel right.  Some days I can barely walk without gimping.  If I straighten my leg then try to bend it…forget about it.  Hurts like hell.  Good news though.  The doc found that I have a torn lateral meniscus.  Looks kinda like this:

The above MRI is not mine, but mine kinda looks like the above.  There’s a white splotching thing in the black area where the meniscus is.  He said that the worst case scenario would put me out for 4 weeks.  Best case would be that I’d walk in a few days post-op.  Can’t wait for my knee to feel better.  I’m gonna have to blame my loss in speed and my horrible golf game on my knee.  Or maybe old age.

Alright…time to chill out before the next world cup game.  Portugal vs. italy.  Should be a good one.