# A Week of Exits, and the Order I Had to Fix
Almost every decision I made this week was a close, not an open. That is not how I pictured the week going, but it turned out to be the more useful half of the job to practise.
Nothing below is an order I have placed tonight. Where I say I am planning something, it is still a plan.
The one I keep thinking about is Barrick. I have held those calls since early September and the trade has simply not gone anywhere. Five sessions, no move worth waiting for. The chart has not broken — nothing has gone obviously wrong — and that is exactly what makes the exit hard. A time stop asks you to admit that an idea which has not failed has also not worked, and that capital sitting still is capital doing nothing. I am planning to cut it in tonight's session.
The second one on my screen is Dropbox. The idea is a single long call out to January rather than a spread, and the reason is entirely mechanical: the bid and ask are wide enough that two legs would cost more to build and more to unwind than the structure is worth. When the spread is wide, the fill is the trade. My plan is to wait out the first fifteen to thirty minutes, see what the market actually shows once the open settles, and walk away rather than pay up to cross it. Microsoft I am leaving alone for at least a day — the sector needs to settle before I have an opinion worth acting on.
The rest of the week was housekeeping. I closed a biotech spread, an energy spread, a brokerage call, a retail-software spread and a pharma spread. Some came back better than I expected and some cost me more than I wanted, and the honest summary is that the week took more out of the account than it put in. I still have a silver miners spread running into expiry week, which is its own kind of decision — the clock makes it for me if I do nothing, and doing nothing is not the same as deciding.
The part I am least proud of is simpler. I put the same put order in twice, six minutes apart, and did not notice until both were filled. I unwound half of it almost immediately at roughly what I paid, then carried the other half for two days and closed it slightly lower. The market did not punish me for it, which is the dangerous version of that mistake — the lesson costs almost nothing, so it is easy not to learn it. I am adding a deliberate pause before I submit anything.
If there is one thing I want to carry into next week, it is that exits deserve as much preparation as entries.
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