Here is a great clip I took from CNBC the other day. Apparently this is breaking news to the investment industry.
Breaking News: Machines do not operate by themselves!
Sometimes being an Engineering student going into investing seems intimidating, like there are all these people doing it who know so much more than me. Then I see things like this, and the fact that this is breaking news to some investors makes me feel like I’ll do okay.
Lots of people love to badmouth Jim Cramer of Mad Money especially since his appearance on The Daily Show with John Stewart. Unfortunately I am a fan of both of these people and although John’s humor is great, his oppinion of Jim Cramer is just dead wrong.
In any case I have huge respect for the opinion of Jim, but his particular stock pics are only marginally useful. Take a look at this picture:
Cirrus Logic steps up as a reccomendation comes from Jim Cramer
In any case, this stock which Cramer has some very good observations about was up 15% today which I believe is largely attributable to its being mentioned on Mad Money.
How can we take advantage of his advice then? It would seem a more prudent strategy if you have done your research and want to invest in a company he has reccomended is to wait out the initial over-valuation that will likely occur. Many of his reccomendations do pull back after the un-strategic buyers have take their positions. Waiting for the pullback is probablly a viable option.
Quick posts are the key to keeping this site updated methinks. So no more long winded posts for the most part because I never write if I have to write a lot.
Take a look at AT&T today. They have pretty solid fundamentals and a nice 7% (ish) yeild via dividends. If I wasn’t fully invested like a fool then I’d totally get into this company.
7% yeild at 25.10 seems like a good buying oppourtunity for AT&T symbol T on the NYSE
The above picture is via google finance, the prettiest finance site.
Anyway, I haven’t done a huge amount of research on this one but AT&T isn’t one to cut dividends. I think this is just market volatility providing an oppourtunity. I by no means am saying buy this stock, simply it might be an interestering one to look at more closely.
I must say I thought this time would never come. I never felt like a phone would be released that I could be truely satisfied with. Being a person without a smart phone, it is easy to question weither the extra money is really worth whatever tiny increase in efficiency can be gained from having a smartphone strapped to you at all time. Let me tell you, it is worth it. The Blackberry 9700 is the best tech purchase I have ever made.
Lets be honest, I am addicted to information. I am an avid amature investor, sports enthusiast and tech lover. This means I spend a lot of time reading news, but more importantly WAITING for news. This caused me to be strapped to computers all the time. Along with this, I recieve many emails for work and school related things which means I am on the computer all the time. Having moved beyond this, I can now honestly admit i used to spend 10 hours a day infront of a screen.
In a completely unrelated plug, if you enjoy wasting time on flash games you should check out Kevin’s Flash Game blog. Anyway…
The issue that arises from this is that being strapped to a computer limits your mobility. I cannot be on a bus to the university, if I am expecting an important email in the next 15 minutes. Along with this, since on a computer you check your email only from time to time, it tends to come in clumps which makes you ignore it. For me it is easy to igore certain emails when I recieve upwards of 60 per day. If you are a hard working individual this is no problem because you have the determination to reply to all your mail. For me however this meant many messages would be lost to the sands of time. No more however!
I can say with much happyness now that my day consists of about 75% less computer usage than before. This usage is also for tasks that are soley productive and things that I cannot do on a mobile device. Every one of the menial tasks which I used to wait around to do on a computer to do, I can now do on the fly. The only time I log into my email accounts now is to send files from a computer to colleagues.
Almost as important is the fact that now, I can tell people with 100% certanty, when I am and am not avaliable. Having my calendar with me at all times has made my social life way better because I don’t always have to wait to check if I can come to things. People respond much better to you when you can say with certanty when you are and are not avaliable.
Lastly, email response time. I now respond to 100% of urgent emails I recieve. This is because it is much easier to take emails as they come, rather than in a batch at night when you are tired. Plus, this gives you things to do on the bus or while in an unproductive meeting. Not only are the emails coming in at a more managable rate, but I can now pipeline my life by doing work when normally I just lose working time.
There are many more awesome things I would love to talk about regarding my phone but these will have to wait for later. I feel like I’m rambling. Another post is sure to come soon. And guess why I have this free time to write in my blog? Because I’m not spending this time doing things that I can now do on the bus. Haha.
Hey Friends. It’s been quite a while since my last post but some cool stuff happened today and school isn’t quite as insane as usual so I’ll fill you in on a cool event today. Today there appears to have been a clear positive breakout on SVC (Sandvine) on the TSX. Here is a chart I drew of the event:
Symmetrical Triangle Bullish Breakout
As you can see over the last 6 months Sandvine has been consolidating within this symmetric triagle pattern. As you can see the pattern has developed over a seriese of months of higher lows an lower highs.
If the obvious outliers are excluded the average volume has been decreasing which is a good indicator that the pattern is valid.
A symmetric triangle pattern usually means the underlying pattern will continue, or in some cases indicates a reversal. With SVC is it hard to tell what the underlying trend was because the stock has been basically stagnant for quite a while. But the positive breakout does indicate the stock should be moving higher.
A price target is usually estimated based on the size of the base of the triangle. The widest point in this pattern is roughly $0.90 so a target to be looking for should be around $2.20 for this stock.
Considering this pattern is usually expected to occur over 3 months I believe it is reasonable (as a trade) to only put your price target at around $1.60-$1.75 But, I am long this stock so I will not be selling at these levels.
I do not trade soley on chart patterns but considering I truely believe in the companies fundamentals and with the expansion of wireless data networks and the demands being put on them I believe this company has a great future.
Pumping money into R&D seems to be the name of the game right now but once profits start being seen there is nowhere to go but up (or being bought out). Considering this stock has traded above $7.00 with no earnings I believe the upside is emmence.
The only fear I have when considering this chart pattern is that I would have liked to see larger volume on the breakout today. Either way I believe the stock is moving upwards but without a much bigger volume move I would not trade specifically on this pattern. The company fundamentals make up for this fact as far as I am concerned.
I have waited quite a while to post mostly because I have been busy recently, but also because I didn’t want to publish my trades too close to their occurance.
Grande Cache Coal (GCE on the TSX) had a large upward move around August 7th 2009. I used this oppourtunity to sell my position for a around 105% profit. I was averaged in at $1.71 and sold for an average price of $3.60 . Looking at the stock now it is easy to get angry for selling so soon, but in reality it was a good place to get out. Getting too greedy can be dangerous, and the stock did pull back to $3 quite quickly.
I didn’t buy back into this stock at $3 for two reasons, the first being I was in the middle of switching brokers (I now use Questrade), and secondly because I have targeted a new company to start a position in.
I am now looking to start a position in Sandvine Corperation (SVC on the TSX). I’ll update on this when the trade has been made but for now just indicating the company I’m interested in, no price targets or strategy.
I still currently hold a position in Citigroup long term.
Well my summer job appears to be over for the most part. Many of the goals not obtained yet, but it is always a struggle with small businesses determining what direction to go. I am though frustrated at this point. Not because I’m not working, but because I am so bored most of the time.
That being said I still have some things going on. But finding motivation is quite hard. It dosn’t help that I have almost no friends in Guelph also. So maybe I should go home for a while. Who knows.
Winston Murray, Laying on my Couch
To the left you will see my dog winston. He is chilling out on the couch right now. I feel bad for him because somtimes I feel like he has nothing to do around here. He just looks at me like he wants somthing. I took him outside a bunch but he is just restless. It’s kind of annoying.
So really the deal is that I need to find somthing to do. Stocks can be fun but unless you have a lot of money to invest things can get boring.
On the one hand I have 30 Rock Quotes. This is a website I started a while ago but was forced to switch hosting and was unable to work on the site. It used to have a #1 ranking on google but now is not even listed. Currently I’m working to bring the site back up to par in order to resubmit it for listing. Things are going well but grabbing quotes from episodes is a lot of work! Finding motivation for this project is hard just because of the insane amount of time creating the quotes takes. So far I have about seven episodes complete. I will get this site up and running by the end of the month for sure.
After the page is being searched again by google, it’ll be some work to win back my #1 rank. I think the content will do most of the work but I may need to get some high quality links coming in.
On the investing side of things my major investments have faired very well recently. My portfolio is back into positive territory as huge demand from China has driven up interest in metallurgical coal companies:
GCE Rally in July 2009
As you can see on the right GCE has had a nice move. Soon I believe this company will be approaching my sell target. I am hoping that this occurs soon as I have various companies I am very interested in owning right now, which I believe have very high upside and relatively no downside at all. I’ll fill you in on those if/when I purchase the shares.
Citigroup has recently doubled their share count and held fairly strong at around $3.00 (USD). I am down a lot on this investment but very happy with its performance in rough times. If anything I may have to hold NYSE:C for longer than I expected. Averaging down on dips would be a good idea but I am currently have no cash on the sidelines.
Other than that I’ve just been trying to find something fun to do. I’ll be super happy when I have some people around that I know. Perhaps with less course work this year is my year to focus on socializing…
I had been having problems for the last 2 months with the internet in my new house. I’m with Rogers (no surprise) and not everything was going well. My connection was slow at best and would only work for periods of 20 minutes for about 10 times a day.
My roomate called into Rogers once and we gave them the router error messages (this is after I had determinted the error wasn’t in our network). And the guy on the phone said he did some fix and the net worked for a while. But big surprise, it stops working within 24 hours.
Long story short, we were all busy at my house for about a month and didn’t get down to calling Rogers. Then we decided to order digital cable. (I now have CNBC which is GREAT!).
When the technician came to our house he glanced at our router and saw the light blinking awkwardly and said “whats the deal with your internet”, to which i replied “Its been screwed up for a while.” and went on to explain the problem (I was going to ask him about it anyway in my defense).
The technician (a 20 year old guy) checked the lines and was like “Wow this is fucked”. He went on to replace ALL of the hardware in our house for connectors (indoor and outdoor) and then went up on the poles and replaced some hardware on the power lines. Then he checked out our neighbourhood box because it was screwed up.
Thats the end of the story. My internet is amazingly fast now and works great. The moral of the story is, if you don’t want to get passed around the Rogers call center all day, ask for a technician to come to your house (make up a reason if you have to) because they actually can do things to fix your problems and not just lie on the phone with you for hours.
Google Finance Market Summary for June 22, 2009
Today the Basic Materials, Energy and Financial sector stocks were among the hardest hit in a big correction caused by many investors realizing the economy isn’t recovering as quickly as some had guessed. The United States government warned investors that unemployment will hit 10% in the near term.
My positions being in two of the three aforementioned sectors, one might think that I would be scared shit less. Although I wont be so bold as to say I am cheery at this correction, I am not scared. Why though, why am I not shaking in the corner of my room in the dark flicking the light on and off? I’ve seen this all before and I trust my own intelligence and knowledge. In fact, if I was not a student and had money on the sidelines I would be averaging my positions in financials down over the next two weeks.
Bank of America (BAC) dropped $1.28 to close at $11.94 today for a correction of 9.68%. You want a nice entry point? There it is. Most big-time investors will look for a pullback of maybe 5% to enter into a position in a company they think is stable. This is almost double that in one day. Yes it may go lower, but if I had the money I would be averaging in. Bank of America is widely believed to be a $20 stock by many many people.
This is the one area I am a bit crazy in, but it has served me well before, I believe that if you really think a company is good, trust your own judgement. Do your research, consult the appropriate people but don’t give in to the idiots on TV just because they disagree with you.
I bought into GCE (Grande Cache Coal Corp) at $3.55 and it hit $0.49 basically in a linear descent from where I bought it. I averaged down with what I could spare and got in again at $0.55 Most people would call that a very stupid move, cut your losses because the company is crap. Most people are too afraid to believe in their own judgement however. Now in the past week GCE has closed as high as $2.27. Averaging down on that investment saved me from needing to hold it forever to see my money again.
Again, yes I can see why the big money managers are scared of what new powers the Fed and SEC will have when reworking the banking system. I know Citi which I own will be much different in the future but this is not a $3 stock in my opinion.
The more Citigroup (C) goes down the more I want to buy in again. The same applies to Grande Cache Coal (GCE). Unfortunately as a very small time investor and a full time student, this isn’t possible at the moment.
Most people who know me know one of the stocks I watch quite closely is the Albertan metallurgical coal company Grande Cache Coal. I watch this stock fairly closely but the amount of news available on GCE is quite small as it is not a huge company, although it is quite frequently one of the most active stocks trading on the Toronto Stock Exchange.
Just this last week GCE.TO stock had a cool little technical event happen. Check it out:
Grande Cache Coal Ascending Channel Breakout June 2009
As we can see an upward channel trend (parallel high and low trend lines with higher highs and higher lows) seems to have started around March 2009 and continued until this past week when we had an upward breakout on LARGE volume.
I’m not completely sure what to expect from this 2 day breakout. I believe there will be large volume profit taking early Monday morning followed by either a huge dip down to 1.80-1.90 level OR continued climb up to around $3 (over a couple weeks) where I believe we will run into resistance. In either case Monday should tell us weather this is a permanent jump to higher levels or just a quick pump and dump. Hopefully mutual fund purchasing (which I have been told occurs in large volume on Mondays) may drive this stock up some more.
Either way I think we have finally broken the 1.70 resistance level which was really holding this stock back. Hopefully this is a real move. My price target for this stock in December is $3.50 – $5.00 depending on global steel demand particularly that from China.
I would also like to point out the awesome performance of RIMM (Research in Motion on the NYSE) after I talked about the double bottom of the stock in an earlier post.