Trials and tribulations

DJI 1st November

At 2:15 I was woken by the dog slurping up his water so I went to look at the Hong Kong market. It was displaying weakness but nothing terrible. I placed my orders to sell my Hong Kong stocks and went back to bed. In the morning they were still showing as pending and the market had dived. You have to put in limit orders on the HK market so I thought that I had screwed up on the limits in a falling market. A bit of investigation revealed that this was not so. I waited till 7:30 when the TD Waterhouse staff started answering their phones. It was then that I discovered they had a problem with their systems - because of the change of clocks of all things. Computers take time too seriously and screw up.

Anyway it seems that TDW were inclined to do the right thing and roll back to check whether the trades would have gone through. And if they found that the trades should have gone through they would honour them. Big sigh of relief. Until in the afternoon I discovered they had accepted three trades but had cancelled three others. Luckily for me the HK Exchange has a reasonably nifty web site that tracks prices and trades. I had a look and accepted that one of the trades would not have gone through, a second was debatable, the third was clearly in my favour. The Exchange data is not crystal clear so I am now waiting to see what TDW make of it all. It did not help that the people who were making the corrections thought that 2:56am GMT was 13:56 HK time (It's actually 10:56). I have sent in my complaint and await the result with interest.

All this stopped me fretting about what was happening on the market. I had been right to pull out it seems. Most of that euphoria that had pushed the DOW up to 12284 has smashed into the shards like a broken Hellenic urn (I turn my hand to the purple prose when I feel like it. And I have been stressed all day.). But I am keeping my anxiety in check. Remember all those support lines that I pointed out yesterday. They are still there and the 11720 seems to be doing its stuff as I write. It was the thought of those support lines that stopped me from buying shorts - that and the speed of the fall. But it's a long time till 8pm when the US market shuts and things may change. The important support line is still 200 points lower.

In the mean time gold and silver have been thrown out with the bath water once more. And that hurts because I still have big holdings.