Yesterday was one of those whirlwind days where everything blurred together — errands to run, tasks to finish, and time slipping away faster than I could catch it. By midday, my focus was so scattered that I completely forgot I even had a Tiger Brokers account. It wasn’t until the evening, when the pace of the day finally slowed, that the thought suddenly resurfaced like a forgotten to-do list item floating to the top of my mind: “Wait... my stocks!”
I opened the Tiger Brokers app and began scrolling through my portfolio, not expecting much after such a long, busy day. To my quiet relief, the numbers were green. SOXS, TLT, and TLH were behind the gain. SOXS had made a decent move upward, while TLT and TLH were gently positive — nothing huge, but enough to tilt the balance in my favor.
iShares 10-20 Year Treasury Bond ETF (TLH)
iShares 20+ Year Treasury Bond ETF (TLT)
Still, I’ve learned not to take SOXS too seriously. It’s unpredictable — one day it’s soaring, the next it’s tripping over itself. It’s the kind of ticker that keeps me humble, reminding me that luck and timing often dance closer than I’d like to admit. But now, at least, it decided to play the hero.
Direxion Daily Semiconductors Bear 3x Shares (SOXS)
I decided to make a small move — buying a small amount of OXY shares. The real motivation? A simple “1 U.S. stock trade” task that would earn me 100 Tiger Coins. Hardly a masterstroke of strategy, but I figured, why not? It’s a small position, and OXY is a solid name to hold for the long run anyway. Sometimes it’s the small, casual trades that make me feel like I’m still in the game, even when the day has run away from me.
Then, curiosity pulled me to the S&P 500 chart and there it was: a wall of red. The index had slipped more than 1%. Technically, not a catastrophe, but it felt heavier than the numbers suggested. After months of near-relentless gains, even a modest pullback looks dramatic like seeing a scratch on a car that’s been spotless for too long.
Of course, my first thought was: what triggered this? A few headlines later, I found my answer. Trump, once again, had stirred the waters, floating the idea of a “massive increase” in tariffs on Chinese imports and dismissing any reason to meet Xi Jinping in South Korea as previously planned. Predictably, the market didn’t like that tone. It’s fascinating how a few sentences from a political figure can ripple across billions of dollars in market value within minutes.
As I sat there, phone in hand, watching charts flicker red and green, I felt that quiet hum of awareness return — the one traders know all too well. Markets have a way of humbling us the moment we start to relax. They whisper reminders in red candles: “Stay sharp. Don’t drift. The game never sleeps.”
So while SOXS, TLT, and TLH gave me a small win, the day carried a quiet lesson. We’ve been riding a bull market for quite some time, and it’s easy to slip into complacency. But all it takes is one headline — one unexpected shift — to remind us how fragile momentum can be.
Comments