Quick update - May 19

• I have stopped pair trading completely and embarked on swing trading before the trade war started. Again. Picked up my Jedi stick to train my psychology and temperament with a "never say die" attitude this time round. (So let me take back my previous conclusion in one of my posts...)
  
  
  
  What have I achieved YTD?
  
  
  To sum it up, it is not easy at all to beat the market as a trader. Despite missing the early rally in the first quarter of 2019, I count myself lucky to have caught some late rallies before they fade away like the rainbow. My "heroes" were Walt Disney and Monster Beverages. Pocketed some neat profits riding their uptrend and later got whipped out by the trailing stop during the price rally's pull-back. Setting Stop Loss is an art more than science. Trail too close and you would risk getting stopped out unwittingly, trail too far away and you would risk not locking in as much profits as you could have.
  
  This time, trading with a different psychology and approach, I ditched my "sure win" conviction when initiating positions and "played safe" by analyzing the risk-reward, set trailing stop losses (when you take care of the downside, the upside will take care of itself), and minimizing the use of CFD (as leverage can make one take on a bigger position than one's risk appetite allows).
  
  I find that trading is an activity that allows self-discovery. Alot of inner demons (greed, fear, anxiety...) will get reviewed and if you spend enough time reflecting you might find the way to deal with them.
  
  Despite all that work, I might have been better off just buying the S&P500 ETF or any big cap stocks since January and hold them all the way (less effort!).
  
  

The illustration below is my return bench-marked against US500.

Cumulative P/L (USD) YTD

Return % still fall short of S&P500

• Hoping to catch the tailwind of a market down-turn, I am putting up some short positions. If they are profitable, it means I am getting some effective hedge against all my long positions (which would likely see red). I just hope I don't get whacked upside down by the volatility like last Nov's.
  
  In the meantime, let's get ready the war chest to take advantage of the trade war onslaught on the stock market.
  
  
  
• I planned to see how I can milk more interest from the boosted DBS multiplier account. I shall visit a DBS branch to find out more about their qualifying insurances (in order to try max the 3 additional criteria).
  
  The first two hoops to jump through which are Credit card spending and Investment are no sweat (see the hack using SSB).
  
  
  
• There's a few REITs that I am currently watching. One of them is First Reit which I already have a position in, another is OUE hospitality trust. There's news of proposed merger with OUE commercial trust. The deal doesn't look bad for now upon calculating (unless OUE C-Reit suffers a further plunge in price). We shall see...