I have a history of not doing so well as an individual stock investor. Like many, I tend to let emotions overcome me. This year I took much of the money in my trading account and handed it over to the professionals via a mutual fund. However, I did keep a more modest sum in the account and determined that I was going to find and stick with a system to see if I could find a winning formula. My main goal was to take the emotion out of it.

So far I have. And while I won't go into the specifics of my secret formula that has netted me a 10% gain already this year, I'll tell you that's it a not-very-exciting take on the "buy low, sell high" advice that any old financial guru has been telling anyone willing to listen for a hundred years.

For me, it meant that this year I was completely out of the market when the February mini-crash came and I bought during the crash. This week: selling out. I've made nice gains, the market's at all-time highs. I'm ready to wait for the next downswing. And what I'm finally realizing after years of being really bad at this is that there's always a downswing.