Dumb mistake yields small loss

I took the March 20 trade off today for a small loss: 1.4%. I missed the chance yesterday to get it off for a small profit.

The dumb mistake I made was to use TLT, an ETF for the bond market, when I had been using SPY that tracks the S&P 500.

The problems are twofold:

(1) the risk graph is skewed with more space to be profitable on the downside than on the upside:

(2) Bonds are inversely correlated with stocks:

(3) And stocks are right near record highs ... and bonds are relatively very low. So a small move down in stocks and up in bonds (seemed very likely to me), and this trade loses.

I had a chance to get out yesterday briefly for a tiny profit but missed it, so the chart now looks like this (with two columns added to give the symbol and a comment)

Trade Date	Symbol	Result	Profit/Loss	Comment
02/06/2017	SPY	Lost	-18%	Trump rally
02/13/2017	SPY	Lost	-16%	Trump rally
02/21/2017	SPY	Won	+15.4%
02/27/2017	SPY	Won	+17%
03/06/2017	SPY	Won	+15.3%
03/13/2017	SPY	Won	+12.9%
03/20/2017	TLT	Lost	-1.4%	Dumb!
03/27/2017	SPY	Open
04/03/2017	SPY	Open

Glad to have gotten that mistake out of my system while testing small ...