Facebook = win. Puts on financials, however …

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Using call options in gold miners, Google and especially in Facebook are among my most profitable trades this year. I’ve had losers too of course, like my put options in JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs.

Despite having been called an idiot (and worse) just about every time I detail a trade or investment here on Marketwatch, there are several huge advantages to writing a public account of your trades and investments and your analysis behind them.

Probably the most important of which is that it forces you to keep detailed, consistent notes that you can then go back to and see where you’ve been right and where you’ve been wrong. Learning from our own and others’ mistakes (and successes) is the only way to truly improve our money-management skills over time.

This 2013 year is already 3/4 of the way in the bag and what a wild ride it has been already.

Let’s take a quick look back at some of the past year’s highs and lows:

Best headline of the past year — Video - Cody Willard: Why I’m the only Idiot Buying Facebook - WSJ

Some winners:

Facebook: Why Facebook is a screaming buy, Facebook? You heard it here first; Facebook isn’t in a bubble … yet, Facebook is still a buy, The new four horsemen of tech
Gold and silver: The gold and silver crash is artificial, Making a stealth leveraged bet on gold, Keep buying gold gold gold, any way you can
Telecom infra stocks: Ciena and an idea on the next one to pop
Bottom in solar stocks: Go contrarian, go clean tech, First Solar is back and tradable
Short Treasurys: It’s time to panic about Treasurys, The single biggest threat to the economy and markets

Some losers:

Financial shorts: Fiscal-cliff lies and how to trade against them, On Wall Street, fraudsters party on
Apple: Trade Alert – Selling Google calls as I buy Apple calls
Zagg A unique investment: Value & growth
Intel - Deep intel on Intel

Markets/economy analysis:

Tech revolution just getting started
Crime, confidence and precious-metal price-fixing
Retirement strategies for a brave new world
Stock-market bubble will get even bigger
Buy when the bulls are terrified

Looking at my portfolio’s performance in 2013 reinforces one key theme I’ve learned repeatedly over the years — it’s when we get positioned in the overall portfolio for big moves over several months or quarters or years that make us our biggest profits and that therefore make the biggest difference to the portfolio. Day-trading, earnings gambles, hedges and other short-term moves we made are key to long-term risk minimization and portfolio management, but they don’t pay big like our huge winners over longer time periods do.

The hedges and trims on strength seem foolish in retrospect. For example, was I really trimming Fascebook FB 0.05% FB calls below $30 a share? Even if I had bought them when FB was below $20 a share, I still want to kick myself for selling any of it now that it’s near $42 a share. Then again, what if we’d ended up wrong about FB or what if the markets had crashed for some reason or what if … we trim for the “what if’s.P Even though we of course wish we hadn’t when the trade works out as well as FB actually did.

Could have been even better and more profitable if we’d just never sold a thing. If you’re thinking that, the good news is that is the mentality it takes to keep you on your best edge as a trader and investor. The bad news is that you’ll never be satisfied when a thought process like that. I guess to sum up the whole here then, it’s once again a matter of finding a balance in your risk/reward mentality and in your life in general too.

On that note, I will remind all of your that discipline trumps conviction which means that you have to continue to do those little things to minimize portfolio risk.

So, as I noted for my subscribers at TradingWithCody.com this morning, I’m looking to (*cough, cough) “trim” some Market Vectors Gold Miners ETF GDX 0.23% calls here this morning. We are up 500% plus on most of these call options that we bought back when GDX was darn near a bottom.

And also trimming some more FB as it is still by far my biggest position and it continues to run higher faster than I have been cutting into it making it an ever larger part of my portfolio.

They give you this but you paid for that
And once you’re gone you can never come back
When you’re out of the blue and into the black.
Rock n roll will never die, There’s more to the picture than meets the eye. (Hey hey, my my – Neil Young)

Cody Willard writes Revolution Investing for MarketWatch and posts the trades from his personal account at TradingWithCody.com, which is not affiliated with MarketWatch. At time of publication, Cody was net long Facebook, Google, Apple, Intel, Gold, Silver, GDX and net short GS, MS, JPM. Follow Cody on Twitter at twitter.com/codywillard.

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Cody Willard

Founder, CEO & Chairman at Wall Street All-Stars, LLC

Cody Willard is the founder of Wall Street All-Stars and the principal of CL Willard Capital. Cody serves as an adjunct professor at Seton Hall University and writes TradingWithCody.com. He was an anchor on the Fox Business Network, where he was the co-host of the long-time #1-rated show on the network, Fox Business Happy Hour. He wrote a monthly investment column for The Financial Times as well as columns for TheStreet.com and was a regular guest on CNBC’s Kudlow & Company from 2004 to 2006. Cody’s stock picking ideas and economic outlooks have been featured on NBC’s The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, ABC’s 20/20, CBS Evening News, CNBC’s SquawkBox, Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, as well as in the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and many other outlets.