What Do You Recommend?

Wow, what an open ended question. A reader sent me this question. No qualifiers, suppositions, or hypothetical references at all.

I could take a lot of liberties here, Blondes, Brunettes, Boxers, Briefs, but I will try to keep it to topics covered in my blog.

Stock wise, I recommend anything on my watch lists. I also occasionally invest in stocks that are not on my watch list. I need to start posting more about those, and why.

Sports / Fantasy Wise, I recommend perennial favorites, bookends, and people going against the weakest defences for their position.

Otherwise, lately we have had some record cold weather, snow and such which made me go looking for my winter gear about a month earlier than usual. This reminded me of my favorite pair of boots. Wolverine Boots. These are simply the best boots ever! I have spent many a cold day and night in all kinds of weather and conditions with these on and never, not once, have my feet been cold. If you need a good new pair of boots, get these. I mentioned them, and their stock back in February, 2010. Since then both the boots and stock have performed admirably. The boots are still as good as new and the stock has gone up over 50%!

I would also recommend INGDIRECT as an on-line bank and investment institution. In fact, I use them for my Covestor and Fumbled Returns Performance Tracking. They have a great investment plan where you can invest free on virtually any Tuesday. It is called automatic investment. Great for keeping costs down and dollar cost averaging. You don’t have to invest every Tuesday. In fact you can turn the feature on or off at anytime. You can schedule for just one Tuesday every month or only when funds are available. What is also great about this is that you can invest dollar amounts, not specific number of shares. This means you can allocate, say $200 to purchase Microsoft, and ING will purchase (at today’s value) 8.30 shares. Yes, you can purchase fractions of shares. This is because they pool every order together and buy in bulk. It does not cost you anything to buy stocks on auto Tuesdays, but you will need to pay $7.95 to sell. Still a pretty good bargain!

As for the previously mentioned topics? Well believe it or not, there really is an adult party game called boxers or briefs party game and, from what I can tell, it is not too adult and actually loads of fun (based on the reviews) to play.

I’d recommend playing it with either Blondes or Brunettes. 😉

Until next time. . .

Be Good, Do Well, Have Fun!

Are you JAMN man?

Behind every stock chart, there is a story.

If, like me, you browse the internet for stock information and research, you probably saw some very interesting ads for the “Next Big Thing” in penny stocks.

The ad was for a little known coffee company associated with one of Bob Marley’s sons who sold the rights to the company to use the Marley name. The company, and subsequent product, was called Jamn Coffee.
These ads were meant to grab your attention with the Marley name, story and history, and get you interested in the stock. The ultimate goal of these ads was to get people to think they really were getting in on the next big thing, and make a killing.

Well, someone did make a killing and many other peoples investments got killed along the way. I have to admit, the ads were compelling and the movement of the stock was even more compelling to watch. For a very brief moment I even considered getting in on the action but did not. I recognized it as a clever ad scheme and a classic pump and dump of a stock.

Back in the beginning of May the stock was setting up into a classic rising pennant/triangle pattern which signaled a potential breakout.

It was during that week that I considered rolling the dice. Investing in this type of scheme, especially after you recognize it for what it is, is exponentially riskier than standard stock pattern investing because the real money and driving forces of this scheme can pull out at a moments notice.

Now as you know, I have been one to take a chance or two (or more) on hype and pattern investing. In fact, I first started this blog in part to see what would happen if I did just that. If you take a look at my overall covestor pattern on the right, you will see a couple huge spikes. Both up and down. I actually did OK with my timing and pattern investing averaging 50%. Half of them were winners, half were not.

But the end result was not all that great.

So, instead of throwing most of my chunk of change towards hype and patterns as I once did, I now only throw a handful at a time and keep the rest invested in selected watch list stocks.
But back to the Jamn story . . .

With a little research, it was easy to see that the Jamn company had a sketchy past and in fact had recently relisted as a “shell” company with no reported sales or profits.

Yet, the stock shot up from about 55cents per share in January to over per share to $6 per share by the end of last week.

The meteoric rise caught not only my attention but also that of the FCC and the company itself. In fact they even released a statement advising people to actually do their own research before investing in any stock, including their own.

So if you happened to have say, oh about 2 million shares, of this company and were somehow behind the ad campaign, your investment suddenly was worth over 12 million dollars.

But, even more miraculous than the 12 fold increase within a matter of months is the sudden collapse within a matter of days.

The stock has crashed since last Friday and hit a low Wednesday of $1 per share.

The moral of this story is that all these “next big thing” stock ads that one sees out there are more often than not just a scheme by somebody who is trying to make a big buck out of nothing. And for those that are legitimate, I would hazard to say that the surest way to make money off of stocks like these by using OPM ( Other Peoples Money). Most legitimate ads and services sell “advice” to others instead of actually trying to pump and dump and or time the moves yourself.

A day late and a dollar short

 

If you look at my previous post, one of my watch list stocks, International Coal Group (ICO), had a really good day yesterday.

This is a stock I have had my eye on off an on for the past month or two because I already am invested in coal with BTU and I occasionally see it mentioned in various articles or news feeds I follow.

So, I was pleasantly surprised to see this particular stock show up on my screens and in fact was planning on adding it to my actual investments. But it seems Arch Coal (ACI) had the same idea I and my screens had. Plus about 3.4 Billion dollars. So they bought ICO.

This resulted in a 30% increase for ICO stock. Yes, Monday was a really good day for investors of ICO. Unfortunately, I was a day late and a dollar short.

But, it does give me confidence that perhaps my screens aren’t all that bad after all. This is the second stock so far this year that has shown up on my screens only to have been bought out by a rival.

So, instead of continuing to watch and track ICO needlessly for the next 30+ days. I am going to drop it from my official watch list and add PDL BioPharma, Inc. (PDLI).

How to earn 10% on your investments per month!

Just follow my Covestor portfolio.

It is based on my monthly watch lists along with an occasional “hype” or “momentum” or “pattern” play.

In all honesty, I wish every month averaged 10% but hey, I cannot complain.

So far, I am up 19% for the year. Which, I can honestly say, is better than most.

April’s big winners for me were MOBI and SYMX. At this point in time, I am only still in on MOBI. But as with all my monthly lists, I keep an eye on any news or breakouts.

So, without further ado, here are my May Watch Lists.

 

Starting Lineup	SYMBOL	COMPANY
	MYGN	Myriad Genetics
	AFAM	Almost Family Inc
	DV	DeVry Inc. Common
	FLL	Full House Resort
	LTXC	LTX-Credence Corp
	MKSI	MKS Instruments
	TNAV	TeleNav Inc
	CNL	Cleco
	HMY	Harmony Gold Mining
	IDA	Idacorp
Bench	SYMBOL	COMPANY
	PSE	Pioneer Southwest Energy Partners
	CMFO	China Marine Food
	HITK	Hi-Tech Pharmacal
	IGTE	iGATE Corporation
	ARBA	Ariba
	GIFI	Gulf Island Fabri
	ICO	International Coa
	JASO	JA Solar Holdings
	LVB	Steinway Musical
	SMI	Semiconductor  Ma
Practice Squad	SYMBOL	COMPANY
	TOPS	TOP Ships Inc.
	TSTC	Telestone Technol
	WFR	MEMC Electronic M
	ACOM	Ancestry.com
	CBP	China Botanic Pha
	GB	Greatbatch
	HEAT	SmartHeat Inc.
	IRDM	Iridium Communica
	MXL	MaxLinear
	RAH	Ralcorp Holdings

Until next time,

Be good. Do Well. Have Fun.

Ready… Set… Go !!!

Yes folks, it is a new year, a new month and time once again to take a look at some things I have been working on.

First of all, I mentioned a couple months back that MSN took away their great customizable screens that I have been using for years. So, this prompted me to look for alternatives.

This lead me to a couple very interesting sites.

Tradeking is a really cool investment site which offers decent, inexpensive, brokerage fees, charts, research, and community interaction. I particularly liked the community aspect of this site. You might remember my write-up last year about Covestor, which I still use and have the widget badges displayed on the side bar to the right. I am not yet sure Tradeking has anything like this but it is a nice complement to the platform. BTW, Covestor now has a trading platform where you can actually manage and trade your own portfolio and attract paying followers just as a broker would. Only catch is that you need mega bucks to invest and participate in this trading and brokerage community. So, if you got lots of cash just laying around, you can go there and participate. But, if you are like me, perhaps Tradeking would be a better alternative. Just a note; one can still register with Covestor and use it as I do without signing up for the new trading brokerage accounts.

Then we have

UpDown is a cool site where you can practice all you want. There are other sites similar to this such as Investopia which also made my worth while list of sites. Investopia however generates a lot of email and relies on hooks to get you to purchase stuff. These hooks are easy enough to ignore and you can find lots of really great information there.
UpDown just appeals to me a bit more in that they do not rely on the bait and hook model as much. I also like the idea of having a place to “play” with investing while not risking real money. It’s a good learning tool.

Next we have

OptionsXpress is another very good and cool site that has a lot of what I was looking for, in the back of my mind, when I started this search. I just did not realize it. You see, this site specializes in option trading, which I do not do, however, they do have a really neat and specialized feature that, in the back of my mind, I had on my wish list.

That is “Chart Pattern Investing”!

Here you click on a pattern and effectively search for stocks which meet that particular criteria. Totally cool!

They too have excellent research and investment information and tons of features to help anybody, expert or novice, make informed decisions. Add to that, their cost is competitive (not the best but definitely within reason), and one has a winner of a site.

And last but not least we have…

Thinkorswim is perhaps the megatron of trading sites and software. I say software because in addition to all their great online features, one can also download trading software which has everything rolled up into one. This site has more information, terminology, features and stuff than I know what to do with. It is probably a day traders nirvana. Unfortunately I am not a day trader, I do not have that type of trading nerve and mentality, nor do I completely understand everything that goes along with it or everything on this site. So, if you are a day trader extraordinaire, dig in, if not, then though I am sure it is probably the best around, it is not for me.

So, have I settled on one of these sites to compile my watch lists?

No. But I have used them, Yahoo Stock Screener, and this site

Magic Formula Investing is based on “The Little Book that Beats the Market” by Joel Greenblatt. This is one of the first, and best books, on investing that I have ever read. It is also a good site to screen for well run, profitable companies.

By combining features, results from different screens I come up with, hopefully, a diverse list of stocks to choose for my watch lists. The diversity often spans not only sectors withing the market, but also trends and types of stocks.

So, how did I do last year? Overall, not too badly.

The monthly returns are from when I posted the monthly watch list until year end 2009.

Meaning, if you, or I, had invested equal amounts in all of my starting January 2009 watch list stocks, we would have had a return of 31%. Not too shabby. For the entire year, everything balances out to about 25%. Again, not too shabby.

Of course, I had my share of winners and losers and interestingly enough, both my biggest gainer, and my biggest looser, comes from my February Watch Lists.

Hopefully I will be able to do just as well, if not better, (keeping in mind one of my new years resolutions to do 50% better with my stock picking).

So with that in mind, here we go!

January 2010 Starting Lineup!

DO , Diamond Offshore Drilling Inc
NE , Noble Corp
STEC , STEC Inc
USNA , USANA Health Sciences Inc
UTA , Universal Travel Group
BKE , Buckle Inc
CNU , Continucare Corp
LANC , Lancaster Colony Corp
SYNT , Syntel Inc
GHM , Graham Corp

January 2010 Bench!

FLR , Fluor Corp
MSFT , Microsoft Corp
ODSY , Odyssey Healthcare Inc
SOHU , Sohu.com Inc
BCR , C.R. Bard Inc
BMY , Bristol-Myers Squibb Co
CSCO , Cisco Systems Inc
KFT , Kraft Foods Inc
MMM , 3M Co
IDC , Interactive Data Corp

I’ll cover these in more detail later this week but for now I’ll leave you with a bumper sticker quote I saw the other day which seems to go along with my tag phrase of … Be good. Do well. Have fun.

“Live so the preacher doesn’t have to lie at your funeral”

Moving up

Not that I am an expert or anything… I most certainly am not!

But just for grins, I logged back on to one of the community type sites I reviewed a few months ago called Covestor.

This is a community of ordinary investment traders like myself. The only difference is that the site keeps track of your progress independent of input from you and ranks you against your peers.

Now, I never gave it much thought and certainly did not think I would ever truly break into any sort of ranking system but low and behold I appear to be moving up the board!

Of course I probably just jinxed myself, but who cares anyway…

Too bad this ranking does not count my first couple of trades from January. My ranking might even be a bit better than it currently is.

And, I even have “an investment” follower! Whatever that is?

Guess I should log in more often and participate in the site more than I do.

The first ranking is base on their “sharpe ratio” which is defined as the following:

Here I am ….

And here I am based on my return from inception (when I joined Covestor)…

These rankings were based on early Monday morning and did not include that last couple days of market activity, of which I have had none because I had not yet reinvested my gains from Qdel last week.

So I probably fell back off again, but hey, it was kind of cool seeing this! 🙂