The stock market had been slowly creeping back upwards, and by Wednesday was set to actually finish February with a gain, the first in three months.

I had a hunch, though, and sold off all my shares of DDM (Proshares Ultra Dow 30, an ETF that follows the Dow Jones Industrial Average and doubles any gain or loss) for $77.05, even though it was still $6500 in the hole since November.  I hung on to all my foreign funds as well as the Excelsior Energy & Natural Resources Fund.

Turned out my hunch was right, the market was down 112 points Thursday and a whopping 315 today.  With less than 5 minutes left in the day, I put in a Limit Buy order for DDM, at $72.05.  In the last minute or so of trading, the price dropped below that level, triggering the purchase, before drifting back up to close at $72.10.  I managed to save myself a loss of $5 per share.

I still ended up $1300 in the hole for the day, but selling and repurchasing DDM saved me from losing another $2000.  I'm kind of kicking myself that I didn't buy DXD (Proshares UltraShort Dow 30) on Wednesday; that could have made me another $2000 or so in profit, for a net gain of around $700 today, but that would have been significantly riskier and I'd have been unable to buy anything else with that money until Tuesday.