iShares Lehman TIPS Bond Fund (TIP)

A neutral to slightly down week for me this week. The market continued to rise, but that was more or less inconsequential, as nearly all of my shorts have been stopped out. I can now safely say that if I had kept my original shorts in attempt to ride out this rally, my losses would have been catastrophic.

Here are the few trades I did this week:

Covered DOW
Bought UGA
Covered LXK
Bought PLL April 20 Puts
Covered CEDC
Bought TIP May 104 Calls



The reason I went long the ETF below is because it is in a short term uptrend. I also find the fact that it broke through its 200dma favourable:

The reason I bought calls, rather than buying the ETF outright was to obtain more leverage. The above ETF, which tracks Treasury Inflation Protected Bonds, is not very volatile, and it would cost me too much margin to take a sizable position in this fund.

One of my risk management rules is to take small positions in very volatile securities, and larger positions in less volatile securities.

Another factor was currency risk. To take a large position outright would have caused me to hold thousands of US Dollars. Although the calls themselves are in US Dollars, it is a much smaller amount.

If these calls expire worthless (which could easily happen), then I will lose approximately 3% of my total account equity.