New Years in Vancouver

After many years of waiting, and a year set aside for work, we're finally in Vancouver.

We've found an apartment close to the beach, we've bought a car and we had a great time playing in the snow on the local mountain.

It's snowing quite a bit at the moment (a rare thing in Vancouver they keep telling us) and we're off to down-town to get a few more things.

KGLJ: Not even funny

...but yet I can't help myself laughing.

Maybe it's because the money is already lost, but for some reason I find it amusing that KGLJ has managed to fall 90% since the marked opened just few hours ago! My initial investment of $260 now has a market value of just $1 - and that's if I could find a buyer.

It's not exactly costing me any money to hold them and even though it wouldn't cost me anything to sell them either, I might as well hang on to them. Who knows...they might come out alive at the other end; if not, then what's the damage? I can hardly loose more than I already have.

Through the last months of investing/trading this has probably been one of my worst deals...at least the rest of the investments that I'm currently down on, has a potential to make me money in the long run.

At least they have humor

Google may be expanding into all sorts of areas, but at least they still have a sense of humor: try to google like a pirate :)

Re-shuffling The Portfolio

I've made a small change to the portfolio, partly due to the current rally and partly to my discovery of the "Dogs of the Dow" trading strategy.

First change was to sell Apple. It might seem nuts but my thinking is this: Apple is very dependant on consumer spending and even though the market is doing well these days and almost everything is going up in price, I don't think we're over the worst yet. The US consumer has only just begun to pull back spending, as I see it, and they will soon realize that there is no more cheap credit to be had, and that they can't keep spending like they've done the last many years. To make matters worse, I don't believe this will be contained to the US but will spread to the rest of the world slowly but surely. Things are already starting to slow down in Euro-land and the UK (the two markets I'm looking at besides the American) and these two markets haven't even been hit that hard by falling house prices - yet.

So all in all, when I saw I could lock in a 25% profit on my Apple shares I decided to take the profit and place it somewhere that's not as exposed to consumer spending.

Next was the usual question of where to place the freed up capital. Having read/heard about the Dogs of the Dow somewhere, I had a closer look at the idea and liked what I read. It's quite different to what I've tried to do previously, but to not put all my money in penny stocks, I thought it would be a good strategy for "securing" growth in the portfolio. I ended up buying Pfizer as they were the cheapest of the top 10 and also the one with the highest possible yield, based on calculations from today. Only time will tell if this is a wise move, but at least these guys plan on paying dividends...

Bluefire Ethanol Fuels (BFRE)

I bought a small stake in these guys today as I think they have a great potential. I only had about $60 to spend so I ended up with only 15 shares. Naturally the price just had to fall today, but that doesn't matter too much...in a short while it should hopefully be up a lot more to cover it.

The company has licensed a special method of converting various types of cellulose material from the "normal" bio-fuel stuff like corn and grain over wood waste to urban trash. The last bit is the interesting one: urban trash. I think the current bio-fuel producers are being (or will be) put down by using food as fuel and thereby helping push the price of food to new highs. When you think of it, its not exactly intelligent to be using our own food to propel our cars etc., especially with the huge problem of hunger in some third world countries. It's a much better idea to take another one of the western world's big problems, trash, and turn it into something useful.

Not only will the product these guys will produce probably be considered "more green" soon, they're getting ready to roll out production, big time. The cool idea these guys have had, is to build pre-fab production facilities so that in the future they can sell one of their production plants as a turn-key solution. Set up the foundation, have the facility delivered, plug it in and you could start producing ethanol. How cool is that.

Oh, and to top it off, they are the exclusive North America licensee of this technology which means it'll be difficult for other companies to get into the same market as these technologies are still just being developed for commercial use.

The share has already jumped a bit on the news that they're almost ready to build their first production facility, but it think that once they get production up and running the price could seriously take off.

A case of good design and usability

I was just signing up for http://www.rememberthemilk.com/ (online todo list) when i noticed this: Instead of asking the user which date format to use, where they live or something else, they ask a simple question to determine a preference that sometimes is made too complicated. I haven't got any good examples of other online apps that have asked the same question, but just consider the options you have in Windows (if you can find them that is...to change the data format you need to look in Regional and Language Options - not in Date and Time which would have made mode sense): I know this is the Customize Regional Options and therefor not a great comparison, but it's still interesting to see how simple complex things can be made... Update: apparently images in an email to blogger isn't working all too well..images added

When not to sell

I've had my Countrywide shares for a short while now (longer than some of my other shares though) and have, agaings all normal advice, kept them in the hope that the value will rise again later, so I won't end up loosing a lot of money on them.

My plan was to dump them once they got to the same price as I bought them at, but according to this article, that's the very worst thing I can do. Rightly enough, the author points out that if I've bought a share because I thought it was a good deal at that price, it might still be a good deal and when it managed to crawl back up to my original price, it might be in a position to actually continue and turn out to be a profit.

I think this is very good advice and I'll try and follow it when, hopefully, my underperforming shares go back up. There is probably one exception though. The auther wrote "Yet what matters isn't how a stock acted six years ago, but how it's acting in the here and now." which i take to say: have an extra look at the stock before you sell. If the deal is still there, don't sell it just because of you pride; sell or keep it on the basis of its value then and there.