mymeohmoneyblog

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havent blogged here since late october. i dont feel like it makes much sense for me to blog as if i have nothing to write about. scratch that, have wanted to blog, but have been having a bit of an organizational writers block on writing on any one thing. (sorry for the ramble here, but ramble i must). think now i'll finally write ramblin' ad-hoc. ... to meet the expectations of the lab. we should all try to write at least once a month i'd think. sometimes even the pro's slack off.
Well the market has undergone a big correction. I was very busy doing a project from oct31-nov16. my temp jobs allows me to work as many hours as i can 7days a week between 7am and midnight, so i spend almost all my freetime staying focused and alert for work - on work; takes me a couple weeks thereafter to rest up and catch up on other stuff. i start another project in a week. i follow the markets daily, however when we undergo a marketmove like we have here recently from the october highs, when i'm working so much the marketmoves seem to unfold at a different speed than i'm used to, slower or faster i'm not sure, just different. i have the feeling that most of the other slo'ers had a feeling like, 'we're in a correction' like everyday, whereas i was like, 'hmmm, i guess we just corrected'. i.e. awareness of what's going on and yet somehow losing sight of the bigger picture. anyways i don't have any current solid guesses as to the future. seems like opinions for a s.claus rally are running at about 3-2 in favor.
i'm fairly content with my original portfolio. it wasnt a winning portfolio, as it lacked bias. my original sloport was diversified, and to win a 6mo contest u need a bias. I've learned that in hindsight, my Strategy Open Lab strategy has been the watchlist, as it seems that's what it has been. No biases, no strong recommendations or picks, just some stocks that i happen to watch on my own. However having a watchlist and recognizing that one has a watchlist is important, something i think everyone should have, and most probably do have, except the beginners. Personally i need to really organize my watchlists. My watchlists, if you can call them that, are really a varied assortment of ticker symbols strewn about my desks, in piles, in folders, in notebooks and scratchpads, on the backs of envelopes, saved on various webpages of financial sites i use, on post-its and sticky notes, on printer-sheets, and in my mind. I feel as if i've been in an extended 'accumulation' phase, acquiring ticker symbols and other quick jots of prices/dates/values and other information, and need to really spend a long time just organizing stuff. If it can be said that there's over 10,000 stocks in our market universe, oh i'd say i've probaly looked a little deeper into about a thousand of them by now. A couple years ago i had maxed out my msnmoney saved-watchlist at like a couple hundred, or whatever they allow, so i'd guess about around a thousand by now. That's much too much info to keep track of, and i'd think the best traders or managers, asides from using systems, actually retain some grasp within their heads of what they're looking for and what they want to do. a certain level of awaresness perhaps. i said that i was fairly content with my original sloport, because as of sometime late oct or early nov, or thereabouts my last blog, when i had checked in earnest, i was at about a 3 percent max gain, or about 1%/mo, or about 12%year, not too terribly bad, perhaps around what the S&P could return. And given that it was largely a diversified watchlistesque type portfolio it makes me feel as though i would have no problems managing a mulitbillion dollar fund. i would only expect more return, with a little more planning, a little more bias, a little more work hedging, or capturing divs, etc, etc. So i'm content in that regard, that i dont think i would lose someone's money if ever actually given a million dollars, and would bet that i'd beat the S&P over the long haul. The crucial diffence here for us all is the Sloport definite timeframe, the brick-wall, the event-horizon, making us do weird things. The greatest variable of all between our 5month sloports and the real world is the end, the definite end, as opposed to the infinite horizon one could employ in thinking about their stock-selections. There is no taking the limit to infinity here. meh, i'll skip all the chances to wax poetic about the end, and just move on. gosh, its 5:30pm now and pitch black, y cant we legislate a 3 or 4 hour daylight-savings-time for winter??!!! so we can have sunset around 9 pm all year long? excuse me while i peek in on the evening news, i'll give u the quick rundown - seatlle flooding... high winds, mudslides,... some snow elsewhere... no iran nukes..., huckabee up in polls in iowa, romney down in polls..., chavez loses dictator referendum..., putin's chances of retaining power a little stronger..., the fda sucks at something, don imus somthing or other, and finally, chimps outperform humans on memory tests!, ok shows over, sorry, back to blogging. where was i, hmmm, yeah well my port did ok up to a point, then i decided to make some changes, more or less to force myself from my caring too much about m-ratings. i noticed before i made my changes, that my trading attributes had said that i was somewhere around a few points positve post-buy, and about 20% post-sell, which seems like a very nice spread but i don't want to take the time here now trying to put that into context, other than to say that while nice it probably doesn't mean too much in the context of this sloport. i had sold off a bunch of stocks, both winners and losers, just to try to 'jumpstart' or 'jumpshift' or whatever VW calls it, into another gear. i had sold ADM to buy JAVA, without even checking/knowing that that very next morning ADM reported earnings, and promtly went up. Not long afterword JAVA's board did an immediate 4-1 reverse split, something i had known they were contemplating but not to enact immediately. Well i had bought a large 15%stake in JAVA just so i could ride it up from the mid-5's all the way up to 7 though the full-margin-6pt-rampup/and-last-years-replay; so now they've gone and shot both themselves and meohmyoh in the feet. I also bought a large stake in crox, for no other reason than that walberg had recommended it and that it had fallen like 30 pts. i keep thinking i'm supposed to be in the black in it as i thought i had bought it in the low to mid 30's but guess i didnt.
i held on to my other eth plays, doubling or tripling down on my biggest overall loser, mgpi, hoping to erase its losses and then work my way back to erasing all my losses on all my other losers by and by. speaking of the eths, i had bought adm, vse, and mgpi at the beginning of the competition, partly because of the corn surplus but also partly because i thought i had heard there was a potential legislative bill the industry was hoping for come this fall, and hence for some sort of repeat of last years huge move up in eths when the dems took control of conress in november '06. something was just approved forcing blending from like 4.2% to like 4.7% or higher or somthing like that, idr. not sure if that was the legislative thing i was thinking the industry was hoping for, or if there's somehing else. vse to m&a usbe, so with the two former news bits the eths have all jumped last week. maybe/maybe-not some continuation. one could write an entire post about being diligent about examing the competive environment and the supply and demand picture for every stock you buy. oh yeah, maybe they were/are waiting for news on renewing the ethblending tax-credit?? dk/dr. we're getting close to the end of the year. (for that.) i remember a time when i used to think just how typical it was for iowans to be greedy and self-serving like the senators harkin and/or grassley with his/their pushing for ethanol, and my thinking how that seemed sort of ridiculous and inefficient and so typical of an iowan to want to try to push something like that. guess i'd forgot how i felt and had gotten a little too interested in the eths by being here and seeing all the corn. don't get me wrong, iowans are some of the friendliest people you'll meet but they can be very self-serving. case in point, i can't help but mention that last year here a tornado came through town and did some damage, mostly to private property. a few city traffic signals went down, and the rec building lost some windows or something like that, and the city claims like a 10 million dollar loss, then they actually petition the governor for emergency funds, and then they actually have the audacity to petition the freakin federal government and president bush himself to declare the place a federal disater area. governor vilsack actually had the nerve to petition the president for this. (the president rightly rejected him and probably had a good laugh about it over dinner) if you had to rent a powersaw for a day or two to chop off some tree-limbs and redeploy some salaried city crews to fix some light poles would you try to charge someone 10mil for that? its embarrasing how greedy and self-serving these iowans can be, but i don't blame them, because i guess they're still trying to deal with some self-esteem issues from the rustbelt days, and like i said, they're sound, friendly, and typical hard-working americans. it's just that anychance they see to get free money they'll try to go for it. like clinton's c.o.p.s program or fema money or... . Well i'm not for or against ethanol, some studies have been showing it may be 15%efficient over the input costs, and it diversifies the energy supply, but its definitely not a long-term solution. I'll still follow vse, mgpi, adm, synm, biof, peix though for trading and investment opportunities.
PDC still stuck at 12 for months now. Had lots of daily-daytrading action moving it back and forth between 12 and 12.5 daily for months, now even the shorting action has died down and its just sleeping at 12. If cold weather and 100 oil arent catalysts i dont know what is. I'd note it seems several of the perennial m100 type-persons have made pitches for the stock in the past as a value proposition, something i was pleased to find. ,However...? (sorry i forgot what i was gonna say, watching Heroes now) Lessee, i've got about 6.5%wgc in my sloport, couldnt even tell you what that is offhand without looking. vasc is at 6.8, knew i bought it too high at around 8 for the slo when i'd bought it. it revolves around 7-8 around its 7.5 ops-strike, been doing that for a long time. i got 'lucky' with it holding it over 6 months from mid-06 till spring this year when it went to 9 then 11; its a very small cap now trading below its recent years' trends. i was looking for a medproducts company a couple years ago when medtronics guidant and all those stent co's were in the news - vasc was in an industry list. Dont know if its a good bet now, and i cant value medcompanies, its just a trading stock because of its strike price. i like to keep track of stocks that stick close to or play off their ops strikes for trading purposes. The tug of war that goes on there probably has more effect than one'd think.
My sloport isnt helping my realport too much. I sold out of pdc a while ago with a loss, tired of waiting in the shorterm, i sold out of wen a while ago after writing about it here, with a small loss, from like 34 to 33, tired of waiting, i'm trying to play isv, a one dollar stock, with no success yet. i've funded my ops account. i lost 10% of a bet on the qqqq's a couple weeks ago, placed after a big down thursday i think. i entered a trade on the at-the-money qqqq's on expiration friday at ten cents, correctly calling the move which then closed at about 40cents like a half-hour later, but found out the hard way i was prevented from entering the trade because of last second exercise-assignment restrictions, so now i know. reentered a qqqq trade like 10days ago, along with a chk and gss trade, all significantly in-the-money to avoid risk. all were meant to be half-day trades (bets on tommorrow), but sleeping late kept me from selling out in time. I've held onto them anyways against my better judgement, and my ops account is overall at break-even, plagued with the same sort of self-cancelling mediocraty i've had here in the sloport, despite seeking the higher volatility i intend it for. I hope you don't think i'm sharing too much about my real trades, its ok if people are reminded of the difference between the slo and the real, and i welcome any comments.
i hope that for the next contest i have more than a watchlist. a real bonafide bias of some sort. i'd like to do a port of only $4 to $8 dollars stocks, to explore the volatility that sometimes occurs with the bulit-in shorting and margin-buying technical /systemic ineffeciences of having to implement cutoff/startup pricing levels for shorting and marginbuys. I.e. i've just seen way too many times that a stock stops/holds at $5 because shorting ends, and that stocks move faster up to and through the full 100%$6 launch zone, something i was hoping to exploit here with JAVA before they reverse split. A move from 5 to 7 is a 40%move, and i've seen that way too many times not to try to take advantage of it. I've got dozens of ticker symbols for these lying around that i've looked a little more closely at. Of course one could just screen too. You still have to play close attention to the trend, and odds are they wont stay still forever in that 5-7 zone. I don't find anything particularly important about any other pricing levels. the 12.5 level is a perfect blend and of no special importance. Sub 5 dollar stocks cant be shorted and thus have an added level of safety. Penny stocks, which domash i believe considers anything less than 5, dont really act like one would think penny stocks would act like unless you're talking about something below the 40-60cent range, if you ask me. and last but not least all strike prices on all stocks are interesting, of course. What is your preferred price level? Or don't you have one? Not that you need to have one. I'll buy at any level, its just that i see special challenges in some of the prices i just mentioned.
Much earlier i had started to run some #'s for you on meoh, which VW had subsequently written a pretty all-encompasing post on its attractiveness. It was undervalued at 20 and has moved up to 29ish. its financial releases detailed some special 4th qtr pricing power advantages/shortages/etc, to compound its value proposition. i had said then that i was trying to develop some sort of value-based concavity model, actually based on an equation of metrics, which could then be looked at graphically as well. while this was partly my thoughts at the time, i think what i had in mind was also creating some sort of a graph of the stockuniverse. i had said 'histogram' but what i really was thinking of was HR diagram, or a 'Hertzsprung-Russell' like diagram as is used in astronomy to help illustrate the evolution of stars. There isn't very good graphical representation of our stock-universe. i know of pie charts showing sector/style allocation, like are found in marketocracy and other financial sites, and 'zones boxes' like are also found in marketocracy, but other than that i cant think of any good graphical representions of stocks to simplify and grasp the character of our stocks or portfolios. If you know of or find something let me know. So i've had this thought for years of making some sort of HResque chart for stocks, and also of some sort of value metric/curved-line-chart for value/undervalued stocks with growth potential, and it could take me years more to ever spend the time truly ironing out something like that. So more power to you if you come up with something like this, just let me know. I cant go too deep into what similarites could exist between HR diagrams and stocks/companies, but lets just say a stock chart or diagram that helps to place it it the stock universe, small-cap, large cap etc, and considering intial size/funding, life-expectancy, burnout rate, etc. could hopefully be somewhat predictive, if not expository, or a stock ...// darn, just got interuppted midsentence for 2 hours by a visiter, where was i now...// "......or a stock....??"... Shoot. 'or a stock....???'. Darn. Oh well, i'll try again. Yes a diagram that incorporates or helps to elucidate a stock's/company's position in our world, you know, will this be a company that will last forever, will that be a a smallcap that never fires its engines, how big is it now relative to its peers, is it gonna grow or fade, is it smallcap-smallvolume or largecap-largevolume or vice versas, or smallcap-positvevalue or largecap-indebt, or etc. etc. Tell an astronomer that a star is a G2V-class star and he immediately knows what you mean and alot about that star, that it would be a main sequence star on the HR diagram, fusing hydrogen in its core, like our sun, with a certain temperature and a certain luminosity, and additionaly he would have some idea of its age, birth, and eventual death, the evironment it lives in, and so on. Tell me that a stock is a largecap, and i'm left to wonder has it been around for 5 years like goog and maybe another 5 hereafter?, has it been around for 25 years like msft and maybe another 25 if its very, very, very, lucky? has it been around for well over 50 years like ge, t, ko and maybe for another 50 more? something i can put away for retirement? Tell me a stock is a smallcap and i have to wonder, well is it earning or losing? is it worth something or anything at all? has it been dancing on debt for 15 years like a biotech or did it just ipo in a new hot sector, bound to generate a lot of heat and then fade away? etc, etc. Do people really balance on cap size and/or should they?? Anyway, it would be nice to have something more visual to look at rather than always having to dig for dozens of different datapoints on each ticker, and to have an easy way to relate your stock to someone else at first listen. 'oh its a such'n'such stock? cool, that's what im interested in, think i'll have a closer look'.
gotta go now, half-past midnight. just let me know one more thing. what's your favorite metaphorical device for stocks? we've got fishing analogies, golfing analogies, beercan-bottom systems, a various assortment of watercraft - guiding their vessels on the open seas, even 'bicycle trusts', and a few others i've left out. i happen to be fond of the short game. did you know you can and/or should be more accurate with your chip-shots than with puts of closer length? it never suprises me to see a pro chip one in from far away. u can pick your landing area, pick your bias(break/line), and put whatever english you want on it (bottom-left, top-right, etc.), just like in billiards. well i hope we can all chip it on, get it down, ride the right line, and let it run. ciao for now.

Comments: View Comments |  Tuesday December 4, 2007