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First post.

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Greetings to the corner of the internet who will read this. Call me aardvark (with sincere apologies to Herman Melville).

The is my first (and may be my last post) as like many of you my real-world demands and the occaisonal bouts of sloth make me put my virtual persona at the bottom of the to-do heap. Having just found the "post a blog" link (courtesy of vanmeerten's post in the marketocracy forums) and realizing today that there is an avid community of Strategy Lab devotees, the very least I can do is share my thoughts.

I fortutiously came in first place in the SLO2 tournament. I didn't expect to be first and it's a happy coincidence that my virtual portfolio mirrored my real money-based trades and market mullings. Alas I disqualified myself from consideration of the grand prize as rules are rules and the winner of SLO2 had to be an active, posting participant in the MSN Money community. Que sera. Something to keep in mind for SLO3.

Enough administrative chit-chat....

My strategy during SLO2. As you may guess from a review of my NAV chart, the fund was in cash from January to mid-March. No big explanation required. Then from mid-March to mid-May, the fund held QLD, semiconducting names, China plays and the brokers.

Then in mid-May, I turned bearish (though a couple of weeks early) and bet broadly on a market downturn with SKF, QID, FXP. I'd like to think that I'm a genius for calling the turn, but I am not. Just made a calculated bet that panned out. Besides in hindsight everything is 20/20 and I'd be owning my own tropical island by loading the boat on AAPL LEAPS during the spring of 2003 or my going uber short and buying boatloads of FNM puts during the spring.

During the duration of SLO2, I avoided (in hindsight a bad move) the energy complex as the whole sector became too frothy for me. Retrospectively, the "obvious" trade was to load the boat on the coal names during April.

Currently I am short-term bullish (even after today's 2% drop) via the exchanges (CME, NYX, ICE, NDAQ), broad-based ETFs (UYG, URE, QLD, FXI, EEM) and select growth names (BMI, WGOV, ISRG).

After Labor Day, I have no opinion concerning the direction of the market and appreciate both bullish arguments that see a 10+% gain into Q4 and bearish arguments that see a 10+% drop into year's end.

As for my investing style, in short I am a CANSLIM-devotee with a few tweaks to suit my style. Nothing much more to add as that about sums everything quite nicely except that I use a proprietary "black box" to make educated guesses about market direction, stock breakouts, etc.

During SLO2 I opened various positions using the Ultra ProShares as those ETFs are liquid and have lots of volatility on the long and short side. Futhermore, I didn't have the patience to open and monitor 30+ long equity positions.

That's about it. Don't really have much to add except 2008 is a tough year for stock-picking as individual names are getting caught up in the general market volatility. It's a good year to be a large macro/event-driven fund; bad to be Legg Mason's Miller.

Cheers.