2008 Portfolio

I rebalanced my 2008 trading accounts. Adding and withdrawing money is a headache, so I will try to minimize that process.

Swing and position trading in pit/electronic options/futures markets: $15000.00
Day and swing trading in electronic futures markets: $8744.04
Roth IRA: $4000.00
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Total portfolio: $27744.04 (as of 1/4/2008)

Trading futures options can be pain in the butt because you need to have a pit trading account, which is what my $15K account is for. I will not only trade options on that account, I will also trade longer term position trade to give more room on my electronic futures account. On my Soybeans and Soybean meal spread, I could have used the electronic account, but that will reduce my buying power for day-trading. Note that commissions are slightly higher to trade pit/electronic ($3.03 per side) account as opposed to electronic only account ($2.40-ish).

I finally opened my first Roth IRA account! If you don't have one, I highly recommend this to anyone because you can always withdraw money you funded without any penalty, but gains are not taxable if you take out after 59.5 years old. I chose to open Equities account instead of futures or Forex because nowadays you can mimic all of those using ETFs. What I will likely do is to buy a few strong companies that I really like and hold them for a long time unless a significant break happens. I have one rule though. I will never put more than 20% of my portfolio to one company for diversification. Eventually I like to have less than 10% per company.

Other than this, I'm involved with a club that utilizes pretty aggressive trading method, but I didn't include this because I don't manage it. I can voice-out a few things, but members' votes are needed before any action is taken on that shared account. Even if significant amount of my money is there, it didn't do much last year. At one point it went -10%. Gladly, it ended up a whooping 1% gain for 2007, we'll see how it turns out on 2008. I plan to give another 6 months before making a decision. I'll write about how it goes.

I may open a Forex account again but still debating between spot Forex v.s. Forex futures. They are basically non-regulated v.s. regulated, but one huge advantage of trading spot Forex is that I am able to trade exotic pairs such as EURAUD, EURJPY, AUDJPY etc (non-USD-related pairs). I did pretty well (+79%) last year on $1K account, so maybe that's what I should do.

I will also contribute more on 2008 Roth IRA, which will make my Roth IRA portfolio $8K, but not so soon.