I've spent an hour or two trying to upload Dow graphs for you, but once again i still get the Internal Error 500 Whoops! message from Movable Type. Its so frustrating and disappointing that this stuff doesn't work

We've been in a trading range with the indices. If they begin to break their lows it will begin to look increasingly like we have a chance of entering a bear market. If you break down the Dow into roughly 20-25 year periods it hasnt really fallen below its trendline unless you go back to '29. It's arguable that in this great american century we havent really had a classical bear market since the depression, notwithstanding all that stuff about arbitrary 20% falloffs, comparisons (e.g. elliot wave) to other asset values, months of descending charts, etc.

If I recall, i think it must of been about 2001/2002, i was looking at the dow chart and thinking then that about 6500-6700 would have been an appropriate and healthful pullback level. I remember feeling a bit disappointed at the time when the indices started to move back up before hitting those numbers, prematurely in my opinion. (i also remember being somewhat suprised during that general time that oil &/or defense stocks had such belated reactions to the plane hijackings that crashed into the buildings in 2001, like months and years belated). Its still a mystery to me why oil took two years to react to those events, and ive never seen if anyone else has ever tried to analyze that.

I can maintain some rather obtuse opinions from time to time. A common point i like to make is that i've never lived through a recession (see above also re: bear market theory). I'm not sure exactly what purpose is served in feeling this way, especially given by all accounts that we have had recessions, 90 (?), 00 (?),... etc. Well i do live in the midwest, perhaps coloring my views somewhat, and just recently it was reported that Iowa's unemployment rate fell to 4.2%. In my county of some 150k plus i havent heard of a single foreclosure nor layoff, everyone goes to work, goes to school, etc. As far as i can tell, the reagan revolution has been going strong for 25+ years.

Well asides from making potentially inflammatory or purposefully ignorant remarks, let me just say that i have no idea which way the market will go. However, i think the potential for an obama rally should be considered. Regardless of party affiliation the stark contrast between obama and bush speaking styles, attention to details, attention to.... anything, could have significant effects on a market seeking confidence (not bravado). Then again, the destruction of wealth may just have longer lasting effects.

On a longer time-frame dow-chart the correction to-date has negated 10-returns leading to a sideways trend analysis. Longer term trending values might still put the dow lower than where it is now, excluding paradigm shifts, productivity assesment, information premiums, regulatory structures, and other assorted valuation modifications. Were the dow to fall below trend, as it last did from 29-33, say e.g. around the 7k mark +/-, and become a bear market, and thenfall an equidistant value below trend as it had gone above trend, well, it wouldnt be pretty, (nor possible - dow minus?). ... lol??

Oh b.t.w. can anyone explain the fundametals behind the markedly increased dow-slope beginning exactly @ jan '95? Are we still undoing irrational exuberance?

What's left to be done for this market. Our 2 nearest calaysts are one last interest rate cut, and then the election. The last rally was all of 2 days. The next rally may last a little longer. Perhaps will get a minor W shaped double-rally formation before breaking the lows.

Why hasnt anyone talked at all about reimplimenting the uptick rule. Regardless of the potential veracity of the purported 'test' studies that were done on eliminating the rule, it seems the prudent and confidential thing to do would be to reverse the since-it-wasn't-broke-didn't-have-to-fix-it inauspiscious decsion made awhile back. Like no one wouldn't couldn't mind the little extra added boost of assurance these days? Just wondering. Jeez, someone cover the bases, please.

I'm not of the short-by rights camp. Of course it adds liquidity. But it is and has always been an artificial construction. One that of course needs regulation. Has anyone ever suggested a finite, maximum borrowed-short limit, say 1/3rd the shares/market-cap? First In, Last Out, Who Cares. I think maybe we could use a few thousand investigators prosecuting failures-to-deliver next year. Caveat Brokers. (and Funds...)

Hey why are individuals allowed to mark-to-model their 30 year mortgages but not banks? Seems like if we're able to budget our spending and saving according to the limits imposed upon us by our 20 and 30 year mortgages that banks should at least be allowed to mark-to-market/model (semantics) based upon something longer than the immediacy of a 3-month 10-Q. How about 30 month modeling/marking or some longer form of averaging?

The 'safest' investment these days may be in currencies, as long as you pick the right one(s) and or baskets. With everything deflating, that held in pairs can't but retain some form of absolute value. Unfortunately most no-one has currency accounts, myself included. I suppose if you live in a big city you could go to a big bank and literally buy some yen for the next couple weeks/months or even some aussie dollars for a short term bounce. I put aside a trip to uk/france this fall because of the outrageous fares, so i'm kinda looking forward to some lower fares/euros/pounds next year. Comparatively of course the dollar is the place to be, but i suspect the yen will retest and probably break last fridays 90 level, and maybe there are some good 3rd world currencies out there to sell right now (sorry). Well i'm just rambling now and not connecting the dots too well and correcting to many keyboard errors gonna sleep now nighty night. zzzzzzzzzzzzz.....

A few of these i liked more than others based on devaluations, dividend rates, and the trading volume.

It looked to me then like most of these had sold off more than 79% and were preparing for a rebound, which has occured recently. I'm not sure if they've recovered that statistical margin yet that would equal a pre-conservatorship price appx. 5x higher (just do the math) but i think their closer now.
I'd spent an hour or two digging and backreading through a deluge of commentary about the bailout and wasnt really able to find the information i was looking for (arguably poor search methodology on my part). Obviously these preferreds were included in the devaluation, and of course there dividends were cut indefinitely, but i was trying to find out when the new federal super/senior preferreds get listed, if at all, and more of the specifics on the fed infusion. Also i couldn't find share counts or market caps for each of these stocks on MSN, so i couldn't really get a good sense of the future risk.
Maybe these still have a day or two left of short-term recovery on them, but longer term, if you've considered FNM or FRE, you might want to consider these instead.
By buying these instead you're most likely aligning yourself more with special interests who may be able to tug some sleeves than with the commons. Also, if you're going to consier the commons, why not go with the preferreds which at least have a chance of reinstating dividends in the distant future. I suppose precedence would dictate that any future (and likely) fed infusions would equally devalue the commons and preferreds again, but at some point the devalution would become farcical, if it has'nt already, meaning there is slightly more reason for the feds to wipeout the commons but preserve the subordinate preferreds to save some sense of decency.

P.S. For all of the preferreds for which i looked at the yearly charts it appeared as though they had just been created this year, so in theory that increases the likelyhood, imo., that the feds would let these recent institutional buyers salvage something, long-term. but that's an overstatement of course, considering they've just been demolished. Also, i believe the fed comments on the bailout suggested that the treasury would try to work with any large institutions who've suffered losses as a result of the devaluation, and perhaps one way of doing so is to implicitly assure these recently created subordinates survive.

Aapl buck a quarter earnings. 4 bucks a year. price ~160. forty years to cover. Ipod sales - saturated. Iphone - prices gotta come down. Mac sales - nice thin laptops. Need to market like all get out, artsy people still want the mac and the rest? focus is back to the mac. itunes - who wants to pay a buck a song? online shows n' stuff. blahblahblah take my imaginary gain for now...

Sold my Packeteer while i was at it. PKTR. It grew to 9%, now it's in cash. Bought out so bye bye. Bandwith management co.

Been workin' beacoup de temps. Classes. Market malaise this summer, like most summers? Oil break sometime this year? Fed cut what, .25? Dollar bottom this summer, after last rate cut and in the middle of the summer slowdown? Got my eye on housing/regionals/eths.

Tried to buy the t-35's yesterday morning for the lag rise on earnings, missed out on 20%, left me frustrated yesturday. Glad i never bought them sbux leaps yet. Is crox a good 12month value here? Who doesn't think T will be well over 40 a year from now? Think gss is/was flirting with 3 again, not a bad entry. Are refiners and eths in the same boat? Are eths cuttin' in to refiners margins? or too small to matter...

Hope you all took advantage of dvw. It's not often you come across a 90d t-bill paying 100% annualized returns. Lost out on about 4/5 of my april ops... T 40's, Sbux 19's, hal 37.5 puts (tried to trade it just as it went momemtum - darn, and this was one of my best personal bullcall theories for the year back at the new year, almost bought the 40call instead...), broke even on the cc (circuit city) 5's (missed selling on the monday morning spike while at work...!), but all in all broke even with a good play on the mgpi 7.5. Looking to do some eth calls or semi-calls or housing calls or financial calls over the next few months. My current most viewed watchlist, the usual suspects.... housing:hov, tol, ryl, bzh, phm, chci; financials: etfc, sov, cfc, mer (puts), etc. for plays and lots of others just for market pulse; eths: avr, vse, peix, mgpi, synm, rtk, for plays and ande, adm for market pulse. (i should probably find a way to watch commodities, corn/oil prices, and eth market prices, margins etc. if'm really going to be serious about this. the premise is, at least in theory, that high an' risin' pump prices this summer would make eth more attractive to blenders, and somehow co's like vse are still making profits with corn at 6pb, suprising some people ); gotta run.

Wanna know what we do here in iowa when the weather gets nice? morels.com, iowa board. sell for 25bucks a pound fresh. mmmmm, mmmmmm, delish. if anyone could ever find out how these mysterious little truffles of the midwest are grown they could make a mint. mahalo mes amis.

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And then i get this time out message:

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I'm done with it, sorry. Why should i waste my time? Anyways...

It was a good week off, though i almost did'nt go, as i was afraid i would miss all the volatility, and it looks like i did. BSC got clobbered and chewed up, and then the market went up like 8% or something? and commodities pulled back. and the fed did some sort of .25 sneak-cut before a .75 fuller cut? didnt see too much news explaining that... what's the point? is the fed trying to micromanage? tsk-tsk.
i averaged in to some .uqqor puts on tuesday around 40c, averaged out thurs/fri around 50c, these are quarterly based tech-index ops that expire mon.the31st.

my review of dow jones news week-ahead news shows some econ reports spread out over this upcoming week, mostly more present data, i.e. march data. M-march PMI, down?, Dallas mnfctrn survey, down?; T-auto sales, down?, ISM mnfctrng, down?, feb cnstrctn, down?; W-feb fact. orders, down?, MON ea's, up?, RIMM/BBY ea's ?, MU-ea's pm, down?; TH-non-mnfctrng ISM, down?; and F-JOBS, Jobs, jobs..............
Overall it looks like we should have some neg news this week, but with my layoff i'm a little out of touch with expectations... . So i'm treading carefully. Also i'm back to work 9-5 for the next few weeks so no mark-to-minute updates for me, just finding the nearest comp at lunchtime...
Tentative prognosis, downtrend mon, downtrend tues, minirally tues into wed (mon leadership and commodities till expected oil release), renewed down thurs etc.. fear of jobs #'s?
i might look to put the market sometime this week, but again, not sure about expectaions. p.s. i'm long ethanol again, but that's a fuller post.

Couple weeks ago i bought my first shorts/ultrashorts/etf's for the slo. Nice to get my feet wet, but feels sort of anticlamatic, though they did help my beat the market this past week.

My own personal thoughts on MOT? What have they been doing staying in products/consumer-goods all this time? They could have been the largest company in the world by this time. Honestly. Sometimes it pays to stick to what you do best, but sometimes you've got to seize the day. As a chicago suburbanite, familiar with MOT headquarters, and a student of history, and somewhat familiar with MOT's grand history in war/radio/wireless etc., i've kinda had that sensation somewhere in my head the last ten years or so like why are'nt THEY the one's capitalizing on wireless? lame, lame, lame. And they ignored my inquiry too boot 3 years ago about alinging with them for new business too. No symathy, but sad, sad, sad...

No opinion on LDK. or on solar. Except to say, and perhaps express some ignorance, that i can't understand why solar is supposed to be so expensive. It's made from sand right? Glass, semiconductors, all this stuff is dirt cheap, right, so y the 'shortage' in polysilicon? i'm not gonna dig into this industry. Something ain't right. I love science, and i could take the time, and if i did it'd probably just annoy me somehow... frustrated with progress. It'd be neat to see some of these photovoltaic companies upend the system.

Should they fight back?

If Microsoft wants to cut into goog's search market, maybe it's time for goog to take the mantle of cutting into microsoft's OS/office markets.

This is really what Msft is worried about anyways, is'nt it? that Goog get's too big? It's not really just about 'search' or ad-revenue, per se.

Goog has ventured into phone ops, their possibly venturing into bandwith, they've already begun teaming with JAVA to crosspromote Java's free OSware/software. Could Goog be the one to finally push msft off the block? Are MSFT's day's numbered?

Could Goog form a consortion with PC makers, memory makers, ops developers and server-co's to transform the PC market and reduce msft to a niche/supporting market?

I should appreciate msft for its historical contributions to worldwide computing and the information revolution. And certainly maintaining millions and millions of lines of code for the end-user is no easy task. And they are american right, a symbol of american ingenuity and strength. And i support profit motive and copyright and patent-law etc. etc.

But i'm mainly a utilitarian. And altruistic. And i've also always believed that the most important thing, knowledge, which can separate the have's from the have-nots, should be freely disseminated. Msft mints gamillions of cd-copies of its software for hundreds of bucks a piece. Don't you think it's maybe time that little piece of plastic, or whatever a compact-disk is made of, should be free? or maybe $19.99? Reducing msft from 97% worldwide monoply to under 40% is a long time coming, and reducing their 'intellectual capital' fees for reprinting the exact same cd gabillions of times from hundreds of dollars a piece to a jackson is a long time coming too.

I don't know if Goog would actually consider buying JAVA, as it would dilute the reason people want the stock, from being an embedded-entangled middle-man transaction-cost skimmer with one core business to a multibusiness halfbased commoditizer. But it's an interesting thought. Goog also has been expanding its server farms, and Java also could help to fit that bill. Perhaps with it's ~200 bil expected market cap Goog should just go all out and scoop up JAVA(15bil mkt cap), MU(5bil cap), or SNDK(6bil cap), Acer, AMD(3.5bil cap), or Ubuntu etc. etc. and put together its own Google Pc with all the trimmings.

EXTRA EXTRA: post-script: i've decided to include a satire i was working on for the slo back in late oct back when goog was at 700, but didnt post, as perhaps i felt i was being a little too presumptious... :)

Original Date - Oct./Nov 2007:

The 800 dollar gorilla?

GOOG Insider trading transactions, insider planned sales - MSN Money

Sorry, drank too much of last years' frozen egg-nog earlier, woke up heavy-hearted...

kept my old portfolio, nav somewhere around 9.?? Mostly losers and i want to sell most-all so i can be more nimble with fewer and larger stocks, but dont like the hassle of picking which losers to sell.

Put 7% of cash into LBAS, Location-Based Technologies, an upstart gps gadget company. I've made it a focus company of sorts, spending a lot of time reading all their 8ks, 10q's, website-info etc. I'll occasionaly dig deeper into a company like this to keep me in tune or to help me brush up or learn more about internal affairs like this, the legalese, accounting tactics and so on, even if i don't actually buy into a company. i'll write up more on LBAS later. there may be an opportunity to churn it. It's already burned its first stage curiousity-rocket boosters, taking it from penny-stock land, past the 4$margin-beginning threshold, and past the 5$penny-stock-warning-reporting-threshold and shorting-beginning threshold, upto the full 6$margin launch zone, before cutting back to 4.50 and now moving back to 5.50. go to locationbasedtech.com or pocketfinder.com to read more for yourselves.

On the surface, LBAS should be tradeable for the next month or two. If they're succesful in manufacturing and distributing their product then i'd say there's definitely a potential market for their product. I have several reservations though, longer-term, based not just on the complete lack of barriers to competition, but more specifically due to the formation of the company. Why did they do a reverse-acquistion with a shell-company to start their incorporation? How did this threesome come together that owns/directs somewhere between 59% and 80% of the company? And what happened to the former owners of the shell company they used/bought to start their new life as an incorporated entity? Were the former wildcatters merely relieved of their debt or given some form of ample consideration? LBAS hopes to market the 'Pocketfinder' for around 129$ with ~15$monthly fees. They've been hoping to go to market by march, but havent yet announced if they've even worked things out with a chinese manufacturer yet to manufacture the product. LBAS has a market cap of about 150million now, about 23million shares issued last fall, at an initial value of .001/.039/.65/1.00/2.00 (take your pick). They have a couple million cash left to burn through, which they expect to burn though quickly by april, by which time they'll need to secure more capital, although they'll likely just reissue. The 18million+ restricted shares owned by the directors i think have a 1year no-sell moratorium which i think means by july they'd be able to sell, though im not familiar with the terms of 'restricted shares'. The officer's contracts look pretty on the up and up to me, with reasonable incentives. Yahoo finance seems to be their chief financial reporting/linking site. i havent checked to see if other sites have more info, but yahoo has the sec-doc-links. Go to finance.yahoo to learn more. Yahoo's historical prices on LBAS show that LBAS didnt have a down day from july17 to november29, nearly 4 straight months of higher-or-even closes, which along with the faily constant volume level makes me think the market-maker for this stock has been doing the trading amongst himself to move the stock up higher to the the 5$threshold.

I wanted to make LBAS 23% of my slo2port and churn it from 4.5 to 6.5, but it dipped to 4.5 a little bit before the slo2 began. I'd have to free up alot of cash by selling losers to buy it. 'Managing' a 'portfolio' can be hard work! I don't feel like selling all my losers even though i feel like selling all my losers... #%$*=`#.

Misc:
If i had cash free'd up i'd probably follow ken kam's lead and buy some aapl at 120 now. Goog's pe's and fpe's are actually starting to look reasonable now with the stock around 500. The qqq leaders have been dead for the last 3-4 weeks. The second half of february may be their time. DVW is at 82cents, its buyout is at 1.02 expected to close by end-second quarter 08 (june), but the proxy-vote takes place feb29; guaranteed ~25% gain minus 10%commish for trading. (DVW pays a 12mil penalty if either side balks - strange). One of my favorite drillers, BRNC, got bought out a month ago by ALY at their bookvalue price. Which means the value goes to ALY now. They'd just gone international too (Libyan contract). Brnc at 15.5 guaranteed payout at 16.33 (with some ALY stock), regardless of ALY price. Now i'll follow ALY (Allis-chalmers) which i think might have gotten a Jubak write-up many months ago. ALY under 10.

I havent traded in my own stock account for months. My ops account was up about 60% in January with sucessful trades on SOV (.sovbv), and ETFC (.eusbh, .eusba). I broke even with a chk straddle placed in dec. I shouldve sold out of my smallcap gold ops on GSS and EGO with much higher gains, but i sold out of the GSS 2.5 and keep rolling the EGO, even though i want out. I got burned on a GFI 12.5, even though i only bought it on a whim to store ITM value, the next day or two it sunk on what i'd thunk was supposedly good news, a full day after the news came out, that being their power-supply being bumped back up to 80-90% by their S.African provider. I lost on the HAL AH jan40's. The qqq's i have a bad habit of buying into on dips, only to have them go lower, and having to sweat it out for a couple weeks each time to break even. Took a really small stake on some 44qqq calls this week a day after the dip, and they arent sittin' pretty. I need to diversify to other index's but i think only the qqqq's give me the volatility i want. I cant believe the market reacted that hard to old/forgone-conclusion/backward-looking news earlier this week. i got slammed hard buy stupidly going a little too long and too OOTM and too close to expiration, even though i knew a post fed-cut-hype-dip was likely. I was heavy on the .chkbr CHK 37.5c, and it knocked my ops account back to even, but today i'm back up 40%. I sold out today at 1.25. Whew! CHK and ETFC might have some momemtum still left for next week (m?). I might try to buy back in them on dips with some feb or mar calls. Overall i'm concerned about late-winter tops for gold and gas, but we'll see. I think that short term rally might occur 2nd half feb. Not so sure about next week as it's ops-expiration week and my recent ops experience is showing that for the last half year the bulls and bears have really flattened out prices going into the final week each month.
Trafe Sading Cand heers

p.s. any questions on LBAS post your comments i've done some research.

p.p.s. here is a copy of an email i'd sent to motorola in 2005 regarding a business idea i'd been working on regarding tracking. I'm hoping there's more than one way to profit from a business like LBAS. I don't like locking things due to the message it sends to society about trust and openess, and what it says about oneself. My mom taught my sisters I never to lock our house growing up. It would bother my dad, and if he'd stop by while we were at church he'd usually lock it, and we'd have to find a way to break into our own house. i do lock car doors just because it's so easy to stick a key into a flat surface, but i dont lock domiciles or bikes etc. I've had lots of bikes stolen. For the life of me i'll never understand or sympathise with how some thiefs must be able to equate bike theft with picking up a dropped mitten or something. I equate it to grand-theft-auto or horse-thievery, worthy of hangin' (or 5 years in the pokey). But i've done the #'s before and it acutally can make more sense to let someone steal it 1x/year than spend the time locking and unlocking it. I'll plunk down some money on a device that can help me catch thieves - (till they get wise), and i hope to acutally make a couple grand on court-settlements with thieves, and have fun catching them too! Don't ask me why i gave up on my idea. I've always got billion dollar ideas in my head; usually i just pass them on and hope someone else does something with them. The bike question still presents several technical complications. Ultimately the best solution would be to have tracking devices built in from the manufacturer, built-into the frame itself, with a keyed-plug for battery acces. LBAS's device is supposedly waterproof, but the battery-life/and/or/pinging frequency would have to be modified extensively for best performace, and the size isnt yet quite small enough to hide, i reckon.:

Sent to Motorola @ https://mcg.motorola.com/cfm/templates/contactus.cfm?PageID=333 (Embedded Communications Computing Group) on 8-09-05.

Hi, just had a bicycle stolen a month ago. I live on a Big10 college campus, & refuse to give in to a culture of locking-up my bike. An INET search shows no anti-theft/tracking GPS/rfid/... products in the U.S I would like to market a cell-chip/receiver-responder that could be employed in a bike handle or seat post or crossing tube, run on a small 2-3yr life battery, and have client log in tracking/mapping to self locate or fax to police for recovery. It should market retail for appx 10-15$ to compete with traditional anti-theft(cable/ulock). Cellphone companies are the logical choice to develop, given the already current triangulation capabilites embedded in current models. Would you help me design and test such a product? We can talk further about my ideas/specs/business if you want. Hopefully your parts fabs already have what we need, or their might need to be some mods

"Pullback to 12500 +/-200 within next 2 - 8 weeks, small end-of year rally back up to 13200 by end of year. Financials volatility for next few months. end 2008 at 15500 +700-500, with more chaff burnt off, lower rate?, higher comps(latter half 08). Cant beat the housing dead horse forever. Definite dent in consumer discretionary spending. However consumers only account for 1/3 of economy (or is it 2/3?? - i forget), but the marketcap dropoff from pullback dents mid-upper class personal/business reinvestment/spending/etc. I.e. reducing stock holders networth by a trillion or whatever has bigger impact than a hundred billion of loan default on the economy, nonetheless a soft-landing."

Off by $64.82 for 2007. Not too bad eh? Dow finished at 13,264.82. Still think my prediction for 2008 will hold up? What's in YOUR wallet?

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.

Covad Communications Group Inc. To Be Acquired By Platinum Equity For $1.02 Per Share

Covad Communications has added a news release to its Investor Relationswebsite.Title: Covad Communications Group Inc. To Be Acquired By Platinum Equity For$1.02 Per Share Date: 10/28/2007 9:51:00 PM For a complete listing of our News Releases, visit: http://phoenix.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=67488&p=IROL-news

Symbol Quantity Price ActionNameUS TradeDate Amount
DVW 400 0.79 Buy 11/9/2005 -324.58
DVW -400 1.031 Sell 1/6/2006 405.38
DVW 1000 1.22 Buy 2/9/2006 -1227
DVW 400 1.2299 Buy 2/15/2006 -498.96
DVW 800 1.2399 Buy 2/21/2006 -998.92
DVW 200 1.5699 Buy 3/7/2006 -320.98
DVW -1000 1.8801 Sell 3/20/2006 1873.04
DVW -1400 1.95 Sell 3/20/2006 2722.91
DVW -500 2.16 Sell 3/21/2006 1079.96
DVW -2500 2.16 Sell 3/21/2006 5392.83
DVW 3000 2.0699 Buy 3/21/2006 -6216.7
DVW 1000 2.08 Buy 3/21/2006 -2087
DVW -400 2.12 Sell 3/22/2006 840.97
DVW 2500 2.09 Buy 3/27/2006 -5232
DVW 2500 2.26 Buy 4/6/2006 -5657
DVW -2500 2.3 Sell 4/6/2006 5749.82
DVW 600 2.26 Buy 4/6/2006 -1356
DVW -600 2.31 Sell 4/6/2006 1378.95
DVW -800 2.54 Sell 4/17/2006 2031.93
DVW -500 2.54 Sell 4/17/2006 1269.96
DVW -1500 2.54 Sell 4/17/2006 3809.88
DVW -200 2.54 Sell 4/17/2006 500.98
DVW 3300 2.33 Buy 4/20/2006 -7696
DVW -3400 2.4 Sell 4/20/2006 8152.74
DVW 600 2.38 Buy 5/1/2006 -1435
DVW 1600 2.4 Buy 5/1/2006 -3847
DVW 1200 2.37 Buy 5/1/2006 -2851
DVW -1000 1.89 Sell 5/12/2006 1882.94
DVW 400 2.16 Buy 5/26/2006 -871
DVW 300 2.16 Buy 5/26/2006 -648
DVW -600 2.16 Sell 5/26/2006 1295.96
DVW -1600 2.16 Sell 5/26/2006 3448.89
DVW 1500 2.16 Buy 5/26/2006 -3240
DVW -100 2.23 Sell 6/2/2006 215.99
DVW -1100 2 Sell 6/16/2006 2199.93
DVW -600 2 Sell 6/16/2006 1199.96
DVW -600 2 Sell 6/16/2006 1192.96
Net 2138.84

my port is barely up overall by roughly a half-percentage point.

marketocracy funds update this weekend indicates i am 83.3% compliant since inception and for the 'most recent quarter'.

after doing some calculations and going over my fund's info at marketocracy it seems the indicated percent comes from the fraction 75/90, which would mean they are using the actual inception date of July29th all the way till today, Oct. 27. I.E. 2 days in july + 31 for august + 30 for september + 27 to-date for october = 90. I skipped the first 15 days of the open, the last two days of july (unwittingly) and the first 13 days of august during the downturn (the trades registered on the 13th but i guess they're not counting that). i lost about 5% at the tail-end of the downturn but had jumped in a bit prematurely over overall compliance concerns. so there you have the figures, 75/90, for 83.3%. It took too much research to figure this out. Rules require one to be at least 50% compliant for the 'most recent quarter'. It still isn't obvious to what this refers. marketocracy rankings currently indicate august 31st as the end of the 'most recent quarter'. elsewhere in marketocracy-prose examples indicate normal calendar quarters as 'quarters'. If 'most recent quarter' stats were computed incorporating july for 'Q3' i'd be roughly 52% compliant (july/aug/sep =92days - (31+13 days) = 48/92= 52%); if 'most recent quarter' stats were computed using august 31st as the end date of the most recent quarter then i'd obvioulsy be even less compliant. I can't tell if they're going to compute 'most recent quarter' compliance based on a rolling-daily 90 day time-period, since apparently they're just using the july29th inception date as an arbitrary substitution date for 'most recent quarter' - so far. Anyhow, i.e. hence, and/or so, we are currently 90 days into this competition, from 'july29th' till today oct.27. i have been compliant for 75 days, therefore accruing 29 noncompliant days over the 46day/>50% threshold. As of next monday there will be approximately 64 days left (until NYE (?)). Ummmmm, i suppose maybe i should have used up some more of my noncompliant days by now, just occured to me that maybe we lose them as the quarters roll forward. Perhaps i'll try staying closer to the line in the next open. Too difficult to calculate remaing possible ncd's while factoring in both saved days and the future diminishing time of the contest, while also trying to gauge how the 'mrq' will be programmed.

Anyhows, none of this matters if i can't get up in the moring. Have been averaging an average bedtime of 4-5am, getting up noonish and running off late to class, and only checking markets in the late afternoon, sometimes getting there before close but always reluctant to make rush decisions at close. What time of day do you all prefer to make your trades? My best ideas continually pass me by by not being an early bird. Haven't traded for weeks due to my personal habits. Missing all sorts of opportunities. Could of overloaded and made up 10/15/20% on the leaders in just a day or two everynow and then. Liked the financials/mortgage originators after the mer report, lost 10/20/30% opportunities on the mer's, cfc's, imb's, ko's of this world the last few days and weeks. Repeated opportunities to take the lead, going by the wayside due to my need to sleep when i feel like it. Recognize the need for discipline in both life and investing, however habits can be hard to break. It's occurred to me to bottom fish these financials repeatedly for the last month or so, for 2 reasons, despite their poor prognoses out different time-periods... One, despite some of their rather large writedowns, they stll report positve earnings #s. It's just amazing how many billions in profits the largest of the large are rolling in, despite the writedowns, and certainly then their stocks can look oversold. Second, it makes perfect sense to me that they'd want to take the writedowns now, for tax reasons, as we're nearing the end of the year. If they play it right they might even save some of their available write-downs for next year too (first quarter, and/or second quarter?). Moreover, at some point they'll have to 'write-up' the losses that they 'write-down' for assets they carry. My guess is they'll try to wait till 2009 to do this, but i don't know, haven't thought about it, it's just a guess, based on their wanting to 'limit profits' for both 2007 and for 2008. I'm usuallly way ahead of the game in my analysis of stuff, but way behind when it comes to sleep :( :) I come home and watch the mer's and cfc's pop 20/30% from their daily/and/or intraday lows and think how i'd planned on gettin that in the morning...
Write-downs of credit-crunch assests that they can't mark to market, obviously they'd just prefer to hold on to these, take the 'write-down's' that jive with the public perception now, allowing tax breaks for the fiscal year(s) (how could the IRS protest?) and let their accountants and tax experts figure everything out along the way.
Neighbor just came home next door about 10 minutes ago, distracted (me), lost my 'momemtum', guess i'll leave it at that, for now...
p.s. the hawks beat mich.state in 2x overtime this afternoon, they need to win-out to make a bowl-game. drank 3 cups of everclear punch at a costume-party last night ( i was trying to be a clown, but people kept asking if i was 'rainbrow-bright' (who?!) because of my stockings....
happy halloween y'all. don't forget to x-ray your kid's candy :~\

Market Dispatches - MSN Money

sorry no trades, no stock ideas or tips, just putting something down on screen to justify time spent reviewing marketnews.

Google's market cap jumped to about 200billion on friday. Has anyone reading this ever spent a cent on google yet? Google is my primary search engine, i use it all the time to find information, but i've never once responded to an add, or bought something because of using google. When one googles something they get a list of often hundreds of thousands of results, with the first page of 1 to 10 results showing. I surf to the article that looks most relevant for me, and i dont recall ever having spent a penny on any of the adds on the side of the page, or on any click-through sites. Buying Wendys has made me start to think about marketcaps. I think its odd that there's an intangible company out there called google worth 200 billion that i've never spent a cent on, and a company like wendy's worth only 3 billion but which has fed me for years.
Of course google's ad revenue continually jumps higher, and its only recently (like today) that i've begun to accept the virtue/power of add-presence/name-recognition. When i was a little kid i used to wonder why mcdonalds advertized on tv, since i already ate there anyways. i love these sort of innocent/nacent questions/curiousities, and stick to them forever as a sort-of guiding light. But honestly, i've never jumped up and ran out to anywhere because of a commercial. If you see a mcd by the side of the road..... well back to google; i dont see myself ever taking a position in it. it has troughed out for quite awhile relative to itself, and so i suppose it's time for it to start making its way up to 700, but it's for the large-institutional investors, not for me. I would, however, on the contrary, no doubt love to play with a 200bil market-cap stock if I were incharge, wouldnt u? just think of the possibilities: googlephone, googleOS, googlesoft, googlefax, googlebroker, googlerealtor, googlegps, googletravel, googlemail (nextphase snailmail virtual transport/fax/dump), googlebay, googletv, googlepedia, googlephoto, googlechannels, gagglegoogle/ooglegoogle (social networking), googleflight, googlevote, googlegov, googlecreditcard, googlepay, googlecomp, googleauto?(to compete with the I-car?...), googlemusic, etc. ... Barring regulatory prohibition, anythings possible for a 200bil virtua company right? Lets compare google to wal-mart for a second. Wmt also has a 200bilion market cap. Now that makes sense, doesn't it, instinctively? In a way, it seems a shame that wal-mart stock has flatlined ever since 2000. Anyone not buying wmt last month just missed a great opportunity to buy it at its 7-yr-flatline-trending-low of 42 climbing right back to 47. I think that wmt management strategy the last coulpa years has been to start growing up instead of out, converting to supercenters rather than mass-expansion, hoping to improve comps. They're still eeking out sales gains, even in this recessionary-wary environment. Perhaps its not fair that they've been blocked by regulators from moving into banking, and i certainly would or could trust and support them on such a move (in house credit processing for sure!). Now google at the same market cap can expand into any industry it sees fit with its play money, but wmt is confined to its original business, despite the competive and ever-changing world we live in. I like walmart, and have given them thousands in revenue, despite the many naysayers among my peers, especially in a liberal college town, whom boycott wmt on principle. (as an aside, i've been boycotting target/tgt since 2003, when i had applied to help them with their seasonal rush in a measley shipping/receiving job, and had been put through 3 interviews and a piss test, and offered the job, only to have it rescinded due to a credit report, as i had never used credit at that point based on my fundamental christian upbringing. and i will continue to boycott them indefinately, giving wmt all my big-box spending, and that of all my family and friends whom i turn from tgt. rule #1: customer relations) As another aside, is it fair that wmt cant do in-house procesing of credit, like tgt can? is it fair that they're denied further entry into the banking/credit arena, when S & L's get bailed out in the 90's, when B&B's (banks and brokerages) today get bailed out with a rate-cut, when both smallcap and largecap transaction/credit/data/ companies proliferate and/or merge and/or go public, and in an era when the big boys mastercard/visa/discover/etc take advantage of going public too?
wmt should at least be able to have a say in their and their customers own transaction costs, right? Where are the lobbyists worth their salt? Well it seems wmt has decided to undercut again, in reports this week, to get a head start on the holidays, a strategy which has worked well in previous years. But as i've alluded to in earlier posts on small-margin discretionaries, i woulndt be suprised or at least would think that small-margin discretionaries, such as a wmt or wen, would try to incrementally increase there prices to counter decreased unit-volume expectations. I would find it very unusual if retailers across the spectrum didnt/havent noticed that somehow with bush's 'keep-buying-to-do-your-civic-duty-and-ignore-the-war" mantra and the concurrent massive rise in oil and pump prices that consumers are willing to pay anything for anything, or at least have not changed there driving habits, engendering the thought of 'why not me too'. Honestly, if you're a seller of any product and you look over and see the energycomplex gouging consumers who don't respond, why wouldnt you raise your prices too? If we begin to see upticks in inflation over the next year or two, it will have much more to do with the 'inflationary well-hell me-too-then' mindset and the bush antiwarawareness strategy of go-about your-business and buy, rather than half or quarter point fed drops.
My advice to wmt, raise prices on anything that isnt already priced psychologically at "?.97c" and get some better lobbyists.

Moving along, it seems that owning anything that carl icahn owns might be a good idea. the marketdispatch article mentions not one but two separate companies in which he has stakes which have gone up friday due to his activist pressure to sell: biogen idec, biib up 18%, and later in the same article bea, BEA Systems, still jumping after Oracle's offer. Even GM was mentioned in the article moving up friday 6%, without mentioning Icahn but to which if memory serves Icahn was mentioned a lot with regards to GM back when GM was under 20 a year or two ago. A quick google search of "icahn holdings" leads one to this page .

The market dispatch wrapup also highlight some key earnings reports this week and some economic data to be released. Based on this limited info i will attempt to make a daily prognostication for the upcoming week, somthing i havent done for a long time but which i used to be able to do like clockwork back in high school. Monday we should open up on follow through buying from friday and somewhat of the general year-long merger-hope psychology. Citigroups earnings should be discounted, and Mattel might take writeoffs for their struggles, i.e. 2 irrelevant earnings reports. the market will come down from it's monday high and trend down right through into tuesday, which should open down but finish higher on the day. Decent earnings from intc, ibm, jnj and yhoo will relieve people, and the financials wfc and tma, however they'll report, should be somewhat discounted already. Buying should increase into wednesday, with JPM and KO at worst balancing/cancelling out their earnings reports (KO up - pep report and falling dollar) and relatively tame and/or discounted tuesday/wednesday industrial production and cpi data, and wednesday housing starts data bad of course but perhaps in more in line with recent applications. Thursday and friday should see a repeat of this week, down thursday on underperforming expectations on goog and bac news, and friday up on postive earnings from industrials like mmm, cat, hon, and slb.

The marketdispatch article also mentions that MCD reported same store september sales rose ~6 percent. Outstanding and mcydees continues to impress. Don't know how they do it. Hopefully i'll get a followthrough pull on wen. Looking at wendy's options today, Wen at 34.35. 1week 35 calls at ~30cents. Nov30 calls at ~4.6 (only .3timevalue). Dec30calls at ~5. Mar30calls ~5.6 and Mar25calls at ~9.9 (time value ~.55), and finally Jan09-20 &25 calls at 14.5/10.1 with timevalue decays of only .75/.15. Stay away from out of the money calls as you dont know how low a price an lbo could lock in. The later months' ops could help protect against an autumn market dip, if any.

GE reported strong earnings and revenue, which bodes well for PHG in my sloport, a longterm international hold for anyone.

In other news, VTSS, a joke stock one dollar stock added to my sloport last week in a very tiny test fraction, has bumped up on thursday and friday on news they are entering settlement talks to end all of their litigation over mismanagement and backdating options scanals. The stock went from about ~90 cents to a buck-ten, and would be a neat one to play with for some short term action. The fundamenls are poor, of course, but i have traded this one personally in the past with some success, and perhaps it will get a third-day bounce on the news, and perhaps even some mellow sustained higher trough action as weeks go by, and maybe even catch an overall tech bid before next spring if they could ever report in the black. It's not like anyone can short a one dollar stock.

Think ill look into berjaya.com for the ticker symbol on berjaya, to see the price and fundamentals of berjaya, a malaysion exchange co which recently entered into an agreement to run some wendy's chains in malaysia. (do muslims eat beef :?). malaysian conglomerate with several business branches...

In personal news i finally updated to Microsoft Internet Explorer 7, after being forced to adapt to Windows Live Hotmail last month, and the whole experience just sucks, and makes me want to go out and buy some redhat, RHAT, the underdog linux co. Like the linux story for years and have looked at rhat on occasion the last coulpa years but for whatever reasons didnt see the price-entry points i woulda liked. Think i heard they recently reported some good numbers. WindowsLive makes my mouse-scroll action all jumpy and limits how many messages i can display in my inbox and removes the quicklinks on the page to msn.com, etc., etc. Now with IE7 i can no longer right-click on the backward and forward arrows to return to previous pages a heck of a lot quicker than just doing Alt-arrows repeatedly. To make matters worse upgrading to IE7 alphabetized all my hundreds of links and favorites and there's no way return the organization to 'by date created', the way i have it organized chronilogically in my mind and life. Have wasted many many hours tinkering with these probs and searching for help and of course msft is such a behemoth its unrealistic to expect any help or changes. I'm just about the only person i know left still using either hotmail or IE for a browser.

The article to this link states a wendy's franchisee already operating about 100 restaurants, Carlyle Corp, not to be confused with the Carlyle group, is also interested in joining potential other suitors for the company. This isn't the strongest news one could hope for as a holder. WEN has a 3bil market cap. Apparently Triarc Cos. has already offered 3.6bil. Carlyle thinks the offers out there are too rich at today's prices and hopes wendy's keeps the business in house to someone who already understands the core values of the company. I'm waiting for better news.

A market cap of 3bil means wendys is only valued at about 10bucks for every person in the country. They cant equal 10bucks a head in retained earnings to up their value/market-cap in the future?
Time to raise the dollar menu. Time to make breakfast. Time to build out more stores. Time for a larger buyers' group with more leverage to infuse some capital or changes, not a measely 100store franchisee. Of course you don't want someone to come in and strip it either. Don't know why they're even thinking about putting themselves up on the block. D/E ratio is .79. Anyhow, look at the charts, this stock ain't going down. If they decide not to sell, so what? The stock is trending up by itself anyways on its own merits. A value play, a small growth play, and a buyout play all the same. Low risk, low-gain, but possibly more gain. Nice scenario. Would be nice if they put something together this month. I hear people beating the panic drum on future bank earnings announcements, as if we didnt know and or should care. Tidal forces picking up by the next waxing crescent moon. Hope there's no riptides.

good entry charlotte. words of wisdom. kudos. stay the course. i recall looking over cvx a year or two ago and it looked really good, one of the best poised of the major integrated oils. your profile says you like to invest in dividends. hey does anyone know any good websites with dividend screens/databases where one can easily find which companies are going xdiv today, tomorrow, this week etc.?? MSN has a decent 'earnings caledndar' but no 'dividend calendar'. i want to try buying and selling everyday just for the dividends. Someone please let me know if you know of a site like this.

btw this entry is being done via a 'quick-post' entry i'd set up through movable type. it's kinda nice for commenting on an article. you just right-click on whatever article you have onscreen, choose 'quickpost', then type your entry in the pop-up. (typed into the entry body field, not the extended body field)

p.s. charlotte i vate you a '2', though prob more like a 1 and a half :/ :)

Enable those comments people.

Tried a penny stock today, and lo and behold the 5%max commish takes precedence. SLO needs to ban this.

Also tested the OTCBB with Vtss today and it bought - thought OTC trades werent supposed to be enabled. Maybe i remember wrong, or maybe its just the pink-sheets are'nt enabled, i don't remember and i don't feel like digging for that information right now.

Russ previously informed daytrading is allowed, but difficult. (and expensive - my inclusion).

Why do you invest? Good question indeed, Eileen. Makes me think. I guess personally i dont worry too much about preservation, since i don't have dependants. And i'm not looking to attract a mate based upon 'net worth', heaven forbid. Ideally i'd like to earn 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 hundred etc. percent returns every year. i want to quickly compound thousands into millions, so that i can facillitate the many business ideas i have, without resorting to loans, or VC, or partnerships or anything like that. I've more or less got complete business models in my head for everything from cellular, to restaurant, to optical, to sports, to auto-industry, etc... . Some of what you might call 'disruptive' innovation/competition. I guess i am more prone to 'gambling' at times. Something i am well aware of. However i am always attached to and somewhat fighting my conservative upbringing/principles in order to 'make it happen'. As i've posted earlier, i think er hope that eventually i'll be able to take the plunge on some successful Leaps. There must be some sort of expected return for, say e.g., a 1 year call-leap on a/an average say 30% underlying move in a year on say an average 20PE stock. Like something in the 'multiples'. I think, er hope, that i can do that. My experiece has shown me that 'value' and/or bottom picking-investing can accomplish this. The SLO lab has/is confirming for me that on a short(er) term, 5-6month term, that momentum 'investing' has more success, as it seems that the vast majority of all slo ports are going up simply because the market is going up, and those going up the most are going up with the most momentum. 'timing' and 'worth' are very esoteric things, and i guess quantum economics disallows any precise certainty of a stocks value. oy vey, where am i going with this, please ignore me... i digress...

uhh, well, this SLO is teasing and tempting me to become a momemtum player, seeing the sucess everyone else is having. I too, have a sort of 'split personality' a.k.a toroandbruin. In real life port i've had a conundrum. As i've said in my marketocracy bio, i havent really shown much in the way of gains in my meager portfolio since i started more actively investing a coupla years ago. However, a pattern has developed. i typically work these 3-4 week temp jobs, then i get a few weeks off, and so it goes throughout the year. Whenver i'm not working, i 'trade' and bring my portfolio up. Conversely, whenever i work, my portfolio goes down, either because i parked dough into value stocks that may trend down for a little while, or because i put something into a growth/momentum stock which falls-back/pulls-back, etc., and most commonly because i live a hectic life and would accidently stay in trading postions that required careful watch. So in essence work has become very difficult for me, because i always feel like i'm sitting there all day for scratch, and losing even more than i'm making during the day. It sucks to work all day for a hundred bucks and come home to find your portfolio has gone down 300, knowing you could have stayed home and made 300 instead, or a net diffence of 600, plus the time 'wasted' at work, for the man. I find it hard not to rationalize that the market goes up or down on average one or two percent a day, or that certain stocks that one follows goes up or down 1/2/3 percent a day. And that with just a coupla quick trades one can beat the 'ideal' 5-10% annual gain that exceeds most of humanities/nature's growth rates. Anyhow, i did this SLO to try to better understand 'midterm' investing, as i call it, so that i can better align my short-term trading and long-term investor tendencies. However, i'm learning more from all the players than i am from myself, as my port has been predominantly random. So thank you all for your interesting blogs.

Two myths i'd like to point out: myth #1 - investing with emotion is bad. It has often been precisely when i have felt a sense of emotion, such as confidence, resentment, desire or someting like that, more generally what i would call 'being pissed off', that i notice i have made gains. Sometimes when my port feels stagnant i get 'pissed off' and make wholesale changes, ignoring transaction costs, and for the better. sometimes when i am tempted to sell and i Know or get 'pissed off' that the rest of the market doesnt recognize something too then i'll hold out a little longer and eventually get my gain. Yes there have been several times when i've bought 'quickly', such as for an earnings announcement, and gotten burned 10%, but that's not so much due to 'emotion' as to simple gambling on announcements, a practice i now more or less eschew.

myth #2 well i guess this really isnt a myth per se. but what i'm trying to say is that so much about what this slo is, and why im learing from it is, is that just like in the experts-msn-slo lab, choosing an 'investment style' and then 'sticking to it' is _________/?????/ hard?/not always the right decision? Sorry, i just lost how to word what it was i was trying to say. In other words, the experts pick a style and stick to it, so that we the readers can learn along with them; slo lab players here too for the most part have stuck with their investment philosphies as well, and we all learn from it. However, i personally am beginning to notice a parallel between my slo port and my real life port. In real life, i often get enthused by so many good stocks, good stories, good valuations, so that my port balloons from one or two or three to up to 10 postions, and for 'good' (not) reasons too - because i see sucess coming elsewhere, because i want to be a part of that story, because i want to contribute and support those companies, because overall, i and we all sense the optimism in general that comes with being a part of our worlds corporate life and the forces that help to change our world. I of course pick good stocks when i do this, and truth is, most stocks will go up over time, this is 'life' after all, not the dark ages, or an enduring black plague encompanying us, however when my port does balloon my gains become stagnant, as i've simply stretched myself too thin, increased my transaction costs, and allowed my stocks to cancel themselves out on a daily basis. I havent been to over 3 or 4 or 5 positions in real life for like over a year and i dont intend to again, at least not unless i can eventually work up to a self-supporting (livable/income-producing) size. My slo-port here is sill predominantely a random selection (not quite random) of initial stocks, and were it real life i would have certainly by now been tempted to turn the whole thing over. Sometimes in the past i've looked at my real port of 10 or so contrasting do-nothing postions and then spur of the moment sold them all out, and started out fresh with 1 or 2 particular picks. It's ok to change things up, at least for non-dependant/non-depended/non-retired/etc.etc. profiles.

Hey does anyone know what the average 'turnover rate' is for an average mutual fund? Sorry for the long post, guess i need to get a life... :) Peace.

Bought 100k worth of wendys with my remaining cash here at the close of friday. Rumors it may get bought for 37-40. Currently at about 35. Merger monday news perhaps? Anyways, i'm a wendys fan, love their dollar menu. Where else can you go for a cup of chilli, a salad, and a baked potato for a buck a piece? Or a baconburger, or frosty, or chicken sandwich, etc..? Hmm? You tell me. LOL.

Got rid of my 1 remaining share of Gateway GTW that i'd been holding just for show. It'd be nice, incidentally, if we could see how everyone in the game has faired on their previous buys and sells. Those with good showings but current holdings without gain leave many to wonder how they'd made their gains. Something to think about.
Gateway btw is way close to its b.o. price at 1.87/1.90. No spread. Wonder why its so high compared to others. Maybe there's a thought out there that the buyer got a steal for name-brand and perhaps they'd (GTW'd) take a penalty hit in lieu of another suitor? don't know, don't care - it's behind me.

More or less sick and tired of my play portfolio here. Holding on to my random picks from the start. Want to sell but most of them are losers. MEOH jumping big time here and i didnt buy it for either play or real-life. Ughh. Force Protection, FRPT, another stock i like but havent mentioned, in the defense arena, going up good now. Bought some WEN in real life today. Monday i'll at least finish selling RNO. Will probably hold onto STN casinos until Oct5 or just after their xdiv, then sell. Not content with arb play money anymore, now that we're further into this game with more clarity about the field.
Monday ill pick a random stock to test daytrading, to see if its allowed. Also, will pick a random penny stock for just a k or 2 to see if the 5c/share or 5% max commission takes precedence, just out of curiousity.

Anyhows, i think i was kinda thinking that all things considered if i were fed-chairman i probably would'nt of (or at the least - would not have wanted to...) lower rates.
It was my own personal hope that they wouldn't lower rates. Sometimes i guess i don't mind seeing people suffer for there mistakes, though there is value in mercy - n'est ce pas?
So the current scenario would mean some short-term enthusiam, followed by reality, followed by some christmas love/joy/hope.
I thought it might have been better if we'd had some sort of a washout, not that i particularly care what the overall market does, since in my personal portfolio i try to focus on just a handful or less of companies. My SLO port is just floatin' along with modest growth, just like a normal mutual fund, with about 1-3% average gain/mo. Haven't been too inspired to change things, though i know i should.
No new trades here tonight. Now that this fed-watch is over think i'm no longer tempted to gamble on a move one way or the other, so i think it's about time i trim the portfolio down from about 20 to about 9 or 10 positions. For those of you who don't know by now, the ideal high-volatility/high-gain portfolio while remaining in compliance with SLO rules is 7 positions, while having 8 or 9 or 10 positions gives you a little bit more maneuver room. ('dustylove' seems to be doing quite well for a 'many position' portfolio - but perhaps he made his $ early - http://www.investorplaceblogs.com/users/dustylove/portfolio.php -this is not the norm ).

Also, as a perfectionist, i havent wanted to sell any for losses, hoping too much for a perfect sell record to benefit my marketocracy attributes/statistics. One of my cardinal rules of investing is to only buy stocks that will go up over time, no matter how long, so that i never have to take a loss (If I Dont Want To). That's the beauty of time and patience, knowing that eventually every pick you make will eventually be higher. I think the ultimate form of investing for me will ultimately turn out to be Leaps, if i can reach a point where i feel i have the remainder/liquidity to do so. So anyways i've pretty much decided to remind myself to put the SLO first and Marketocracy second, so i am going to be rebalancing at some point here, irregardless of price.

Back to inflation, lets not forget that a vast amount of all consumer discretionary income is ever-increasingly going towards filling up the tank and paying big-ticket monthly communications bills. These huge amounts of discretionary income vastly inflated from years ago and going out the window are not essentially being compounded to gross-domestic-inflation as the telcos and oil co's have essentially been holding onto everything they get and not reinvesting and/nor adding to the economy. So where comes the the discretionary income to pay for increased sales mo/mo, yr/r for regular consumer companies (the WMT's and MCD's of the world)? I think there has been somewhat of a minor paradigm shift from the stagflation picture of the 70's that everyone is so on guard about. If we were to say that in a more balanced (and manufacturing based) society of the 60's and 70's that 90% of houselhold spending went towards 'normal' puchases (durables, consumables, etc...) that that figure has proportionately dropped in today's more service and mobility based economy to say e.g. something like 50-70%. With much more consumer income now being spent on mobility (money for cable bills that allows us to sit on the couch - gettin' nowhere fast, money for the internet - to travel the world, money for telecommunications to call from anywhere to anywhere, and money for gastanks to drive anywhere) and with many of those repspective industries not reinvesting, essentialy gouging americans thanks to goverment granted exclusivity to national geology, radiospectrum, utility, etc... , the portion of consumer income, discretionary or otherwise, that one might of used to expect would contribute to inflationary models has proportionately gone down, or so it seems. Whereforth doth the $ come from to balance out the gouging?.... from modern liquidity, from aggregate corporate participation, from equity, etc... On a related point, i wouldnt be suprised to see many small-margin consumer discretionary stores trying to incrementally boost prices to increase sales, despite slowing demand; essentilly going against the grain of the traditional S/D curve we all learned about in econ 101, (or high-school econ-AP - in my case).
What does this mean?? i don't know. Just blogging. The big picture for me is to just continue to focus on individual stocks, and there are a great many that look cheap. I guess sometimes optimism reigns supreme.