The King

My thoughts on SLO2

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Congratulations to those who have finished in the top 20 and who have contributed some good posts. Five of you are likely to be declared as finalists and one of you will go to SLO to challenge Ken Kam and others. I was unfortunate to miss that cut. I finished at 44th place . I firmly believe that finalists should come only from the top 20 list. Otherwise there is no meaning in a deadline and the performance. Here are my reflections on SLO2 :

How i missed the boat
I did very well for most part of this competition. For about 40% of the time i have remained in the top 10 list and i was in the top 20 (including top10 time) for about 70% of the time. But when July 11th i came, i found myself a few positions short of top 20 list mainly because the Solar stocks were beaten pretty bad in the second half of June and i didn't have enough time to recover from those losses. In this kind of competitions who wins the game depends on when the game ends. You have different people dominating different phases of the game. Different people have different styles and different markets favor different styles. Last week i read on WSJ that this year was the best in a decade that favored Momentum players. No wonder Vanmeerten blowed every one else here. This market suited his momentum play. Whether he will stand head and shoulders above others in all markets is to be seen in future tournaments. Some of the best performers in SLO1 didn't do well in this round and some of the worst performance like duffbeer became the best performers now :) . Coming back to my performance, my portfolio became over weight in Solar stocks as Solar stocks started going down because i am a contrarian player who buys beaten down stocks. Unfortunately the beating never stopped and the Solars went down insanely cheap and my performance has suffered. It's a price i have paid for going over weight in a sector. If you look at the top performers portfolios, most of them are overweight in either commodities or Ultrashorts. So are we all making mistake of not diversifying into other sectors ? Probably not. These two sectors are the only ones that seem to be working and i don't blame any one for getting fully into these two sectors. If my portfolio was down in the last 2 or 3 weeks, that's only a temporary blip. Had this tournament finished on June 15th then i would have been one of the finalists. Same goes had the tournament finished on July 30 ( perhaps). You just can't control the market all the time. I feel like an Investor lost in a traders market (right now).

My thoughts on fellow competitors
I think that Vanmeerten should be the winner. He showed great performance and he explained his momentum methodology in good detail . His initial postings were kind of short and sillly but he has come up with matured postings lately. My only doubt is if the editors are willing to let a momentum player teach people about investing. Most likely it should not be an issue. Regarding others, duffbeer has impressed me the most in this round. He is the best stock picker in this round. He was remarkebly consistent in his ranking. Please rememeber that he does not use any tools or technics to pick stocks as Vanmeerten does. He just picks the stocks without using any tools and plays with them. He doesn't pick ETFs either. He does not post much and he shouldn't even be a finalist. I think that the 5 finalists should be Vanmeerten, rushabout, bankchamp,jaudio and wildmap or MagicNiner.
I was disppointed that most of the people in SLO2 has showed bad sportsmanship when it came to giving ratings. It was a shame that most of the good postings from many people went without any ratings. I initially used to give ratings to all the good postings and i was surprised and felt very bad when people are not reciprocating. I am not saying that they shoud give 3 stars to my postings. But when i come out with a lengthy article, i feel that i deserve some attention to it. One should give some rating to these lengthy postings because they come after a couple of hours of effort and people who read it get some good benefit out of it. Once i got disillusioned with people on this issue, i also have stopped giving any ratings. I was laughing out loud when i read Vanmeerten's requests for votes. Here is one person who has very rarely voted to any one(rarely saw him complementing others) and at the same time asking people to vote for him. No wonder those requests went on deaf ears. Hi Vanmeerten, no offense here.
I never gave any negative ratings to any one in SLO2. I had tough time stopping myself from giving negative ratings to all those silly postings from Allen Liang (the price guy :) ). How can one participate in a tournament and do nothing and just keep justifying the inaction even at the cost of going out of compliance and thus breaking the rules.

What was my trading methodology
I am basically a bargain hunter. So it's a kind of a contrarian play. It's the exact opposite of Vanmeerten's methodology. He chases the winners and i pick the losers. I however pick the beaten down stocks only if it is not in a troubled industry and only if it is beaten down unfairly. It's interesting that two people (myself and Vanmeerten) with exact opposite methodologies have both been very successful at the same time. We both stayed a couple of rankings apart for about 40% of the time in SLO2. This just proves that there are many ways of making money in stock markets. In addition to picking bargain stocks, i also pick stocks based on market conditions. The examples are Ultrashorts. In SLO2 i picked beaten down stocks like LDK, FMCN, NVDA, SKF,SOL, VIP, AMSF,QTWW (a look at this list should tell people that i am a versatile stock picker, not just a Solar player )and then i sold them for profit. Unfortunately some of the other picks have gone down much further after i picked them for bargain and these losses offset my gains in the above mentioned stocks. One can never predict when will a stock price dive down or drive up. I am quite happy with my method and i am always going to stick to this method.

My thoughts on SLO2 organisers
SLO1 was organised very well. The rankings were updated daily and the web features have worked without any problems. But SLO2 had many glitches. There are more things that did not work than the things that worked. The voting buttons won't work most of the time, the rankings are updated once in a while, the ranking system did not work for a month or more in the beginning, they stopped blogger spotlight a long back and there were a few other smaller things not worth writing about. At times it looked like a tournament without the organisers.They said that there won't be a SLO3 in near future. So this might be it.

What i have learned in SLO2
OK, let's come to the final part. SLO1 has taught me a lot of lessons but SLO2 has taght me only 2 lessons. Lesson1 : JUST DO IT (always without exception). My trading is based on quick reactions to the big changes of prices to the stocks in my watch list and most of the time if i feel that something is a buy i just go ahead and i buy it. I had developed great confidence in my gut feelings and i had very good success with the trades i made that way. The bad moves i have made in SLO2 are the times i have hesitated to buy the stocks that my guts told me to buy. In future, i am going to religiously obey my gut feelings. The Lesson2 is ofcourse the need to diversify into more sectors (if i can). This gives me an opportunity to rotate the sectors.

THANKS
Thanks to those who came out with good postings and also those who have voted for my postings. I am going to keep posting in investorplaceblogs in future.