sugarandspice said:
It could very well go down more and then power up past the closing price today and become an excellent buying opportunity for who got in today. The underlying "greed" factor is driving it all. And I believe greed to have many definitions.
You hit the nail on the head

. That is exactly why trying to play the day to day strategy is doomed with TSP. The key is to be looking at trends over the periods of years, months and weeks (in that order), start with a big picture and work your way down to a strategy that you can actually react to. Set points where you can buy and sell and allow yourself enough flexibility to do so, without sweating the small stuff. What you described yesterday is almost exactly what happened last Wednesday and what may very well happen tomorrow, so you have a good grasp on the fundamentals, which is an absolute must.
Here is my interpretation: open a good chart of the DWCP (i.e. don't use Yahoo and not the DWCPF - the pattern is the same but the numbers are slightly different) I like Bigcharts.com's interactive charting, but it does not carry data for the DWCPF. Bring up a 10 day chart, a 6 month chart and a three year chart.
I had a big picture goal based on the three year chart. Mid may, We were at the top of the three year channel, but we were simultaneously approaching the bottome of the 3 month channel. My big picture plan was to maintain in that three month channel until it brokedown, which it did (very subtle) on the 16th. So at that point I transferred to the G and started looking where I expected the fall to stop, over the course of the next week or two. I had 555 as my magic number where I expected the bottom to establish (look at the three chart and draw a line across the two lowest lows and a parallel line along the other lows). It was my belief that it would hit that level and hold, if it goes below it, the market is toast for another 10%. Anyway, it wasn't happening Wednesday morning, so I allowed myself the flexibility to take the bottom at 560 because it was holding going into the noon decision and it was close enough (I bought in at 100%). It immediately dropped to 555 after the mid-day cutoff and subsequently rebounded. If that had happened prior to noon, I would have waited for the 555 to be retested to buy in which will probably happen tomorrow. Buying last Wednesday or tomorrow doesn't really matter in the big picture, the action of the intervening week is incidental. I was in my "buy in" ball park -good enough for government work, I bought. Now if I had not bought in on Wednesday and it drops below 555 tomorrow, I would not have bought in (actually my sell number s 553, jsut to be sure). Since, I was already in, I'm not going to second guess the strategy, If 555 holds great, if not I will probably pop to the G for a day or two then roll over to the F until it hits the next major support level.
It has taken me sometime to start thinking in terms of weeks and months, rather then days. Once you do, days like today become irrelevant - making the whole process less stressful.