The first rule of trading stocks: never look back.

Yesterday I dumped my Marvell stock at a profit. Today, the stock went up another $1.15 during the morning trading. Did I look back and kick myself saying that I should have held for another day? NO.

The first rule of trading is that you never look back upon your trades. You never shoulda coulda. If I was able to look back on all my trades and magically correct them somehow, I would be Warren Buffet by now. I don't even think or talk about how I could have kept the stock for another day or another month and could have made more money. The fact is that I'm not a clairvoyant and I can't see into the future. I'm a trader (or at least trying to be) and I make my decisions based on the market movement and my analysis.

So anytime I hear people talk about how they should have bought this stock or how they should have sold at this or that price, I automatically know that they're a rookie trader. Rookies always talk about how they should have done this or that. I'm not a rookie trader, so I don't look back on past trades and say stuff like "I should have bought this stock at this price." I'm always looking forward towards the next trade.

Goodbye and R.I.P. to my good friend Navin Parthasarathy

This Saturday morning, August 5th, 2006, as I was waiting for CalTrain at the Lawrence station in Santa Clara, I received a very devastating voicemail from a friend of mine. This friend told me that our mutual buddy Navin Parthasarathy had drowned while swimming in a lake near Cornell University in Ithaca, NY on Friday. I was crushed. Navin was a very good friend of mine. During the 2000-2001 school year, we studied together in the electrical engineering graduate program at UC-Santa Barbara. We hung out together all the time. I took him to Las Vegas for his first time. We went camping together at Big Sur. When he used to call me on the phone, he would always say to me, "Ass, what's up." This was our typical greeting as I had taught him how to say this. But no more.

Navin I will miss you sorely. You are gone, but not forgotten.

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