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**TL;DR: I think we're entering a bear market. So I sold a ton of stuff and bought a ton of hedges.** Rest of the text is insight and shower thoughts.
Throughout this war, I've been religiously bullish, nibbling at cheap positions as they came by. But two weeks in, all I've been seeing daily are skittish overnight sell-off reactions to anything even remotely related to the conflict over there. The only few times we got green days was if there was no news, or if Trump said something optimistic.
Since we're mostly in North America, we're subject to fierce opening gaps or morning moves after everything unfolds out of our control overnight. Only those who play the futures/commodities market or trade on foreign markets can actually react live, in time.
Yesterday and today, after seeing how uneventful the market was even without significant news, it dawned on me that some people like me are just refusing to accept that the environment has changed. The risk of a bear market unfolding is becoming increasingly probable, and the longer this war goes on, the more that negative news will keep weighing on investor sentiment and forcing institutions to pull out more and more capital. This will end up becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy even if the war were to cool off, just because of technical thresholds being broken.
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The NASDAQ has already closed below its 200p SMA as of today, which is not a good sign. I've tried to convince myself throughout these past two weeks that everything will be okay, but I'm just not seeing it. There is nothing that could happen in the war over there now that could help the stock market recover in the near term.
Throughout these volatile oil swings, I actually called out every single move in my head, but I didn't act on any of them. I'm not a trader. I don't speculate. But I ended up being right on each one. As of today, I feel that oil could gradually return to $100 again. But I still won't click buy on that. I'd rather trade something more consistent than be a regarded gambler. Unlike some of the all-in gamblers here who go full port and make +1,000% returns on lucky all-or-nothing bets, I'm the conservative poker player who likes calling or checking more than raising.
Perhaps I'm contrarian, but I'm going out on a limb to call a -20% or so drop from the peak set on Jan. 28 by the NASDAQ. As of Mar. 9, we already reached -8% or so. That's already correction territory. If this war drags on and escalates even after that drop, then maybe even -25\~30% could be possible after a while, which would be COVID/2022 bear market territory.
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Even though it's a low point, I decided to flip my stance and aggressively trimmed/liquidated a ton of positions in my 300+ stock portfolio for cash, and converted a good amount of that to hedges on existing long positions and also fresh bear plays. Yeah. I basically went full bear. I'll wait a month or two to see what happens before I rebuy the positions that I ditched, hopefully at better valuations. I ended up pocketing $10.5K in net profit over these two weeks from sheer blood, sweat and tears. I'm proud of that. At least it wasn't a loss.
2025 was a good year, and I bought probably 20 or so different stocks that shot up from their bases (including the very base of NVDA, MU, COHR, ASML, VRT, AMAT, MTZ, GLW, PWR, CAMT, EWY for Samsung/SK Hynix and the second phase of SNDK, WDC, KXIAY, LITE, GOOG, TSM, to name some of my biggest winners). Yeah, I correctly called a lot of the powerhouse winners. But I can't take pride in any of them if I don't pocket any gains and potentially lose them all this year. So I did trim most of them. This is strictly discipline.
I came out of these two weeks with a net profit, so I'm not worried or stressed out. Knowing when to cash out your chips and leave the casino is how you survive bear markets instead of giving everything back to the house. For what it's worth, I think my only meaningful losses outside of a few plays not working out would be the paper losses from market depreciation. But every single person in the world lost value on their core holdings. That's unavoidable. I've been beating the S&P two-fold so far, and I don't intend to let that track record fail.
I've attached the bearish hedge plays that I made today, but I'm not trying to share financial advice with this post. It's just for transparency. Don't blindly mimic them.
https://preview.redd.it/64irm62r5yog1.png?width=1977&format=png&auto=webp&s=b0601aed36dd712967bf2dffa4dffb446ae28a6f