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Being new at this 'game', the opportunity provided here is awesome. I would love to see more of the blogs explaining the whys and whens of timing and selection
Initially I poppulated my portfolio with a number of the more stable stocks (i.e., XOM, INTC, PRU, AAPL, etc.) to better survive the roller coaster ride of August.
I soon realized that this approach was not going to get the kind of returns needed to be even in the upper half of this event as week 3 ended and I was still ranked below 1500. So I began unloading the majority of these and buying into higher risk growth stocks, looking for attractive IPOs with a good baseline and fundamentals and watching the split calendar for opportunities.
Thanks to some well researched choices, perhaps a bit of luck and of course the FED, week 4 moved me into the top 100 (where I've managed to stay, though barely).
I find it amazing the level of talent involved in this event, my portfolio is up 11.4% since we began (after being down over 6% mid August), beating the S&P by over 6.7% and yet that is barely enough to stay in the top 100. My congratulations to all on their efforts, I've reviewed a significant number of the top portfolios and the variety of approaches is mind boggling.
Well I've hopefully managed to learn a few thigs along the way so far.
1. Mindset - I started this with the same mindset I have used for my own meager investments and a few 'paper' portfolios I have experimented with, namely thinking long term and low risk, not a strategy that would skyrocket me to the top of this group, realizing this I have shifted to a more aggressive view with significantly higher risk. I have tried to balance the high risk with diversity both in sector and style in the belief that most of the time large setbacks would be limited to one or two related sectors.
2. Timing - I started my move into more aggressive positions with an initial sell point of 50% at 10% and final sell off at 15% gain, reviewing the my timing and tracking the after sell price change demonstrated that I was being too conservative and I have adjusted my sell point to 75% at 30% gain and then monitor the indicators on the remaining 25% with no fixed sell point. This is serving well and I do keep the initial sell point flexible to take advantage of momentum. What I need to work on here is when to get out of the losers, more on that as I figure it out.
3. Splits - I have reconfirmed for myself that properly timing entry and exit on splits can be quite profitable, though due to Marketocracy's data feed I have to accept a 24-48 hour dip in my stats until they catch up (I'll have to make sure I have no splits effective right at the close of the competition :)).
4. Time - To do this well requires quite an investment of time, monitoring, tracking, researching, planning, etc., quite a challenge with a 'day job' that requires a few hours of my time every day. Well, sleep is overrated anyway.
5. WATCH THE NEWS - I took a beating becaue I missed a little news item about NetBank getting shut down on 9/28. I had bought a large position in the hopes that they would find a deal partner to replace Everbank, bought 250K shares at an effective cost of 0.15, by the time I figured out what was happening on Monday and started trying to unload them (a low volume stock) my sell price is looking like about a 0.03 avg. Hopefully won't make that mistake again.
Well good luck to all, I'll be back later this week to address some new changes in my portfolio and discuss the results of this weeks 'split'fest.
Keep up the good work and please share with us how you are doing it.
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