Setting the stop too close...

Well, i made a total of around $65 from selling my GM and Countrywide stocks, but now i regret having set that stop-marker on the two stocks yesterday.

When looking closely at the movement the last two days, both stocks seemed in danger of dropping or at least being on the way down, so I decided to set a stop-marker to make sure my large profits (...large compared to my other profits) indeed ended up as profits and not just some pretty numbers on the screen. Unfortunately both stocks started the day low or started by dropping substantially below my markers, only to rise higher than before...typical :)

No use crying over un-gained profits, especially since I managed to make a good return within a few short weeks. Now i need to find new "targets" though...

A few gambles pays out

As a bit of a gamble I bought GM stocks a short while back thinking they were cheap and that the US consumer would probably prefer to buy American cars instead of imported ones due to the low dollar. It turns out to have been quite a good idea. Since I bought the stocks, they've gone up 15.37%. In just two weeks. That's not too bad.

Another gamble was Countrywide Financial Corp, which is one of the mortgage lenders who've taken a real beating from the sub-prime problems. They could have tanked and gone completely under, but they again seemed cheap and they're in negotiations with Bank of America to be bought. I bought the stocks just two days ago and since then they've gone up 8.55%.

Actually my whole portfolio have gone up since i bought the individual stock, except for Apple. I believe it's a solid company with good products, so I keep coming back to consider/buy stocks in them. I thought they were about to turn when they were around $137, so I put in a limit buy on $136.80 which was triggered. Now they're down around $131 (a 4.20% loss for me) and have been there the last few days. Hopefully they've stabilized and will go up again soon. Either way I'm holding on to them as I'm still convinced they will fare better in the future.

Overall I'm up about $120, with the current value of my portfolio, which isn't all too bad for a beginner. Given my initial funds were just $2500 it's currently a 4.8% profit on just four months...now i just need to keep that up :)

A few good calls it seems

I hadn't expected my stocks to go up any time soon, but rather expected them to flat-line a bit longer. Yesterday the market reacted quite opposite to the last few weeks and generally rose quite a bit. This affected my portfolio as well so that my GM stocks are up 8.19% from when i bought them, Starbucks is up 6.07% and my gold iShares have just passed the price i bought them at resulting in a 0.66% increase.

Naturally this is not a profit until the stocks are sold, but what it does mean that my total equity has passed the "magic" $2500 limit at Zecco, giving me access to free trades again :) Hopefully this will last a while as it would impact my tiny profits quite a bit if I had to pay $4.50 in commission.

This recent spike in prices might just be a fluke, but I'm going to take the opportunity to invest in some realty iShares i think.

3G modem - Part II

After having un-install most of the stuff on my laptop, I managed to get the modem working (using it right now actually). It seems the problems was with my Belkin USB Bloothoth dongle - whether it's the modem software from 3UK that's the problem or if it's the drivers from Belkin I don't know, what I do know is that I'm not trying to install the bluetooth dongle again...the modem is worth more to my productivity :)

Recession Looms

The FED panicked and cut the interest rate in the US, the major indexes have continued downwards the last couple of day and now even the emerging markets are starting to falter.

It surely doesn't look good, but what surprises me is that many investors are dumping all (or most) of their stocks and are trying to find a hiding place (which is increasingly difficult to find at the moment. Only government bonds seems 'safe'). Sure, you should cut your losses before they become too big, but if your stocks have already lost 15-20% of their value wouldn't you be better of hanging on to them until they regain their value? Naturally you can't know for sure that they will make up what they've lost, but given that it's the market as a whole that's going down fast, it's probably better to hang on to stocks in a good and solid company than running away scared. Everyone knows that you should buy low and sell high, so why are people selling? Ok, there might be perfectly good reasons like the need for the money to pay for something unexpected, but I think in most cases it's more of a knee-jerk reaction to seeing the paper value of your assets plummet (much the same way people have increased their spending, seeing the paper value of their houses rise exponentially :)

I have very few stocks, but instead of selling them to minimize my loss, I'm looking to buy more. At the moment I have GM, Starbucks and my Gold iShares (which all have fallen 3-4% since i bought them) but I'm looking at expanding my portfolio with Boeing, some realty iShares (ICF or IYR) and perhaps even some emerging markets iShares as soon as they seem to have stabilized. I'm still convinced gold will pick up and as for the rest; they have taken huge hits lately despite being traditionally solid companies/markets (except perhaps the emerging markets) and I think they'll recover faster than e.g the financial sector that still seem to have some skeletons in the closets that need airing...

Luckily for me, I don't have a huge crowd of investors to please, so I can take the loss of value without loosing my job.

3G USB modem

As I'm working from home at the moment I need to get outside now and then, and have started going to the nearest Starbucks after lunch. I can do most stuff off-line, and it's nice to have people around you, even though they're strangers. Only thing is, that sometimes I really need an internet connection, which was why I bought a 3G USB model from 3 (they have an offer with pay-as-you-go for £15 per month for three GB of data - cost of modem: £99).

Having bought the thing on the way to Starbucks, i expected to be online in matter of minutes...but I wasn't. After having figured out that I needed the other of the two supplied usb cables (the one with two usb plugs in one end) to get the device to register as a CDROM drive, I installed the software without a problem. But it wouldn't connect. I called 3 a few times, but everything seemed to be fine with my account and they even helped me apply my pay-as-you-go voucher to see if it did any good. Nothing helped.

After a while I gave up, and decided I needed an internet connection to figure out what was the problem (talk about a catch 22...) so I tried again once I was back home. I googled the error message and tried all sorts of weird and/or logical things, but nothing worked. It must be the device then? No...plugging it into my iBook (and installing the software) i was able to get online in a few minutes!

I tried a few other things, gave up for a while and watched Casino Royal instead, and in the end started uninstall all sorts of stuff from my laptop. I've had a lot of bluescreens lately, so something must have been acting up because after having removed almost everything, I re-installed the software, plugged in the modem and was online in no time. Why is it, that stuff like this always happens on Windows? I suspect it was a conflicting driver problem or something like that (even though the manual for the modem mentioned that it would work if programs like Nero, DVD Shrink etc. was enabled/installed?!?!) so now I have to start from scratch and see what I can install and still be able to use the 3G modem

How I wish i could have had a MacBook Pro with parallels instead :)

AAPL and ILMN

Apparently the investors didn't like what Apple announced yesterday...a bit strange as I think their deals with all the major film studios are going to make big waves in the movie rental/sales market. Either way, my stop marker was triggered and the stocks sold. A nice 3.5% return in just 4 days.

ILMN dipped below my marker as well, though it didn't suffer a drastic drop. I had places my stop marker fairly close to the support line so I did expected it to be triggered fairly soon, though I had naturally hoped it would take another jump before I sold it. Anyway, I got a nice return of 21.7% in only 5 days.

...if only i could continue like that and if only my GM stocks hadn't fallen 6.76% and IAU hadn't fallen 2.01% already, I might actually be able to make money of these few lucky guesses :)

Now I just need to figure out where to invest next, and if I believe enough in Apple to re-invest at the lower price (it's now at 169 and I bought the last ones at 171.5 - sold at 177.41) it might just take a bit longer for the news to settle and investors to become interested again.

Buying Stocks in the Present Market

It might not seem very wise to buy stocks at the moment, as most appear to be falling and/or reporting of expected losses. However, it's far from all stocks that are in bad shape and it might not be as many as you'd think.

The stock market acts very strange at the moment with both ups and down. Analyst predict both boom and bust, housing market is going down but gold and oil is soaring. The sub-prime crisis might not be over, the credit crunch seems to still be crunching and today I just read an article that mentions credit swap defaults, which might be the "next" sub-prime crisis (basically, those who lent money also bought a form of insurance and not all insurers expected to have to pay out, making it possible that even more companies will go out of business).

Amidst all this there are still some money to be made it seems. I was lucky to stumble across Illumina (ILMN) last week and bought a few stocks in them. Since then it's gone up around 23%. Not bad in a few days :) Apple (AAPL) also went up the last few days (after taking a beating with the rest around new year's) and I expect it to rise even further once they've announced that-shiny-new-cool-gadget later today (rumors have it that it's a sub-sub-notebook, possibly with a solid state "hard drive" and other new stuff).

So far I'm only up $18 from my initial investment, but I'm still learning and either I've just been really lucky with my last few stock trades, but it seems to be heading in the right directions now...

My current portfolio (which is very small, both in terms of funds and amount of stocks) is Illumina and Apple mentioned above, plus General Motors (GM) becausee I think they're cheap at the moment and because the Americans will probably buy "local" cars as the dollar keeps de-valuating and imported cars will become more expensive for them. I've also bought iShares COMEX Gold Trust (IAU) as their price is supposed to follow the price of gold, and I believe the gold will go higher than it already is due to a falling dollar and general nervousness on the stock market.

For all stocks I've set a STOP marker, to ensure they're sold before the price falls below what-ever threshold I've decided on. Usually a maximum loss of 5% or close to the current price if the stock has risen in value and i stand to make a profit.

Hopefully I'll be able to make a profit off of this, but in either case playing round with stocks this way have taught me a lot about the market and provided me with a new "world" to learn, which was the main idea.

Still alive

Despite what the activity on the blog might indicate; yes, I'm still alive :)

I've just been busy with other things, and stuff that's not on my project-list is basically not being handled. So what have I done with the time I haven't devoted to blogging? Well, besides lounging in our new sofa in front of our new TV (not the best productivity tools in the world) I've spent some time trying to get back into the GTD frame of mind. And it seems to start working. At least the capture part of it...the doing part and the long term planning part is still work in progress, but as they say "Rome wasn't built in a day".

Another thing I've been dabling with is stocks trading. I use Zecco (my invite-a-friend link) for the trading as they offer $0 commission as long as you have more than $2500 in equity or cash in the account. Unfortunately I'm not doing very well, and the resent drop in the market around new years day cleared the (tiny) profit I had managed to build over the last three months. Oh well...the plan is to try and learn, so I take it as a cheap-ish learning experience :)

...better get back to work...and put the blog on my project list so I won't leave it for months before I update it again...