Work, Eat, Sleep, Work, Work, Work, Sleep, Eat

Getting a bit worn down from all of the extracurricular house work, as I can't remember the last time that I had a day completely free from working on the Austin house in some form or another. Finally approaching the finish line, though, so there is that.

It's been a good learning experience, especially as far as managing my time and focusing my efforts, which'll hopefully pay off if I keep buying and fixing up houses. I went a little overboard on the fix-ups, especially given the average house in the neighborhood, and sunk way too much time mucking around with things I'm far from expert in (electrical and plumbing). Which I want to learn, so I don't necessarily mind the frustrating learning curve and wasting of much time, but with two houses that need to get renovated and sold, time is in relatively short supply, so I shouldn't be launching into uncharted waters when I just need to get done and get out of there and off ot the next project.

Not much else going on, other than all of the above. I still keep donking off money in Bracelet Racing futility, but keep funding continued futility through a nice run in SnGs and other MTTs. I need to stay away from the Friday night rebuy Bracelet Races, as they typically require a $100-$125 investment, so it gets kind of pricy and dumb when you play 3 or 4 and don't win a trip. I got fairly deep last Friday but only picked up the blinds with AA twice late in the event, and couldn't get a big double up I needed with KK vs. Q9o when the board came A 2 3 4 5.

The swing trading experiment continues to roll along pretty nicely, although I've only been taking long positions and the market of late has been cooperating nicely in general. It's kind of odd as I've always been much more of the buy and forget about it mentality in the past, so in some ways it's hard to be happy with picking up small pots and cashing out, but all those small pots add up. And you have those nice trades that work perfectly for you, like picking up Google at the lows of the day, just before they reported solid numbers, then unloading it near the high early the next morning, before it settled back down.

I'd be up pretty substantially on the year but got kicked in the teeth playing some dumbass natural gas microcap that I can't stay away from, ignoring my stops and finally taking a 20% loss, only to see that completely reverse itself in just a matter of weeks, powering up to the point where I'd have shown a 25% gain today if I'd held onto my shares. Probably the biggest positive change I've made is simply waiting for confirmation before entering positions, even if that means missing out on some gains by not pegging the absolute bottom. Not really sexy, grinding out $150 in net profits here, $425 there, $75 over here, but money is money is money.