One of my uncles was the first to point out to me, early in my stock market career, that I was aspiring to become a professional gambler. I was a little surprised by this comment at first, since I thought of myself as just reshaping my (it never got off the starting line) academic career and adding to it my experience as an investigator.

I gradually realized he was 100% correct and that my guiding light should be Kenny Rogers The Gambler. Yes, there’s the importance of holding and folding, but another key element for success is not counting your money while you’re still playing.

Unfortunately, I started counting at the end of last month, and realized that if I simply make my holdings look like the S&P 500–so I would neither gain nor lose relative performance–I would lock in an unusually successful year. This started my internal hold’em/fold’em debate.

It seemed to me in January that the Trump idea of restoring manufacturing to the US by taxing imported goods would, to say the very least, get off to a messy start. Of course, there’s the example of the domestic auto industry, which, despite a half-century of protection doesn’t seem to have gained much (any?) ground against foreign competitors. …pretty much the opposite. So retailers of foreign-made goods would find the road bumpy, at least for a while.

Back then, I didn’t realize either how extensive the ICE effort to arrest and deport mainly workers of HIspanic heritage would be, given that shrinking the workforce works against the idea of returning manufacturing to the US. More bumps. …and a clear case for robotics.

A second surprise for me–this one pleasant–was that, from the outset and to date, the primary casualty of the Trump strategy has been the currency. That, however, only increases the attractiveness of companies whose costs are in dollars but have substantial revenues in foreign currency. And it decreases the allure of firms in the opposite situation.

My question for myself today is when is enough enough.

My answer, so far, is I don’t know. The biggest macro issue I see is the card in Trump’s hand that hasn’t yet been played–creating super-stimulation for the economy by having the Federal Reserve lower interest rates aggressively. The last example of this behavior in the US came in the late 1970s, when I was a stock market novice. When my wife and I bought our first house in 1981, mortgage rates were 17% and S&Ls in California were charging 26% for construction loans. The economy was in deep recession.

I’m thinking now that I’ll watch from the sidelines for a while, with my holdings pretty much unchanged. It’s possible that the typical September-October mutual fund selling won’t be big enough to move prices much. If that’s wrong, and prices shift for no good reason, I’ll probably be back in action, though.