Mirant (MIR) is gone

One stock I didn't mention yesterday was Mirant Corporation, a power company with operations in different parts of the world, mainly because it wasn't that interesting :)

It's been going up and down a bit lately, from a small +1% to around -5%, and they might be a good thing to have during recessions etc., but they just weren't doing very well. Might have something to do with the news today that their profits drops and their sales decline...on top of that they've just been sued for contributing to global warming with one of their power plants. Generally not very good news.

Lucky for me though, I decided yesterday to finally get rid of them and set a stop marker just a few cent above what i initially paid for them. At the time they actually looked like they were actually going up, but I basically just wanted my investment back so that I might place it in something a bit more interesting. During the first hours of trading the stock price continued up, just past my $37.10 stop marker, before the law suit was announced. After that they did a bit more up-down, but are now down in $36.90...lucky that i got rid of them in time :)

Now I just need to figure out where to place the money. I've been looking a bit at Index Oil & Gas (IXOG) which is another penny stock, this time in the oil and gas industry which seem to be doing well with the rising oil price.

When to sell...

Some of my stocks are doing really well at the moment - anywhere from +6% to +30% since i bought them, so the question begs: should I sell some of them? (btw: the rest are from -2.5% to -7% with an overall portfolio gain of 4%)

On one hand they could continue rising in value but on the other hand they might have reached their peek. How do you tell? Well, I don't think you can. Not for each individual stock at least, though you might be able to tell based on the sector and/or the general economic outlook.

Let's look at some of the stocks that are down to begin with: Apple, Countrywide and Starbucks. Apple has taken quite a beating without actually doing too bad...they might have been over values earlier or it's simply a result of the looming US recession what make investors think they're going to be doing worse than they have. Well they will, but they're still a solid company with sought after products so they will rebound at some point. Only question is when. I think it'll take some time so if they make it up to the price I initially paid, I might sell them...if not...I could be tempted to hang on to them unless I feel I need to money for another, more interesting investment. Countrywide was a gamble, and I should probably just cut my losses...these guys are in serious trouble and I think it'll take a while before they really recover. Starbucks have had a bit of a revival the last few days on some good news, but I doubt that they are very recession-proof (if anything is) and if I were short of cash, the first place I would cut down was on my coffee...might be different for other people but it's more of a luxury than a necessity so they'll be sold of too.

Among those who do well, I have two pharmaceutical companies (ISV and ISPH) who could both be very profitable in 1-3 years. I have Gold iShares (IAU) who's profiting from the rise in gold prices, my goldmine (GSPG) and finally Boeing. With the expectations of gold going beyond $1000 and perhaps even all the way to $2000, it wouldn't make sense to sell the iShares. Same goes for GSPG as they might start mining gold and silver soon. The pharma-stocks isn't a huge investment and I'm beginning to be more interested in small-cap/penny stocks, so they represent the sort of stocks I'm looking for and therefore not candidates for being sold (yet - though I should probably set a price target for them). The odd one out is Boeing (BA). They represent roughly a fifth of my entire portfolio and I stand to gain around $30 at the moment (not much, but given my portfolio, a nice return :) I'm tempted to sell them now, before they dip again but I have a feeling they'll make it to above $87 before they start loosing momentum, so I've set a stop marker at $87.50, hoping I'm right...

I'll have another look at the stocks I want to get rid of and decide a price point at which to sell. I'd rather put the money into other more interesting investments than having a few bad (and potentially really bad) stocks on hand.

Only in America?

At some point I came across one of these typical things that float around the 'net and wanted to find it again as I thought it was quite funny and an interesting way to look at investments.

Basically a 25 year old woman was looking for a man to marry, but the main criteria was a yearly salary above $500K and not as much his character, person, looks or anything else. I know some Americans are very superficial, but in my book this sort of tops it off. Maybe the woman in question would call me dim-witted farm-boy or something similar, but I simply can't get my head around why anyone would enter into a relationship with such a person? If you're nothing but a wallet for her (and she doesn't carry her own weight) what would stop her from moving on to a bigger wallet at a whim? and what would you get except a piece of "show-kit" that could just as easily be rented?

Either way, this guy responds saying that he fits the criteria but would never enter a marriage with her, at he considered her a depreciating asset since she only contributed her beauty, and that would fade with time. In contrast he argued that he was an earning asset, as he would most likely continue to earn money and more likely than not actually increase his income with time. So far so good - this was the funny part in case you missed it :)

Now, looking for the original post on Craigs List, I found that she had replied to him! How cool is that. Even more name calling and putting each other down...another thing a lot of Americans seem to like, given the popularity of Jerry Springer et. al. :) Anyway, here is her full reply.

Basically what she's saying is that he can't possibly be an earning asset as he apparently doesn't grasp markets and economics. She assumes he's an investment banker and not a trader and therefore doesn't know that "human courtships are based upon a semi-efficient open market, and not an investment banking cartel" (when did stock trading become a banking cartel???). She also claims that with all the dodgy debt out there, which he most likely have invested in, he could easily stand to loose his job and thus no longer be an earning asset. On the other hand, her biggest asset (her beauty) would be able to be maintained a lot longer than he argued due to "advancement in plastic surgery".

Maybe my understanding of markets and economics also date back to the 1950's (as she claimed he's did) but I still can't see the deal in this transaction.

Yes, her (outer) beauty can be maintained longer than into her 30's, but that's the same thing as saying a 50 year old house that hasn't been updated, except for a few good outside paint jobs, is still worth the same as a brand new one - again making the case for renting/dating instead of buying/marrying. Her (lack of) inner "beauty" (aka. personality, humanity, warmth etc.) will at best stay the same. My guess is that it will actually decrease with time as she grows impatient/bored with her (also increasingly older) husband and begins to eye the bigger wallets available in the "market".

Her point on his income being in danger is valid, though one would hope only short lived. If he's skilled enough he should quickly be back on his feet, whereas she would never be able to turn back time. Eloquent as her response is, it still looks like a very bad deal to me as she doesn't seem to bring anything but expenses/debt to the table...sort of like buying into Northern Rock after having been told it will be nationalised. In both situations you'll end up with less money, a bad experience and less trust in other human beings :)

Dodgy RAM?

I've mentioned problems with my work laptop before (in conjunction with my 3G modem) but I'm beginning to suspect it might be hardware related.
The reason is that Ubuntu has just frozen up on me twice within half an hour. That's not something I've experienced before, and with the added problems of coming back from suspension or hibernation there must be something more fundamentally wrong with the laptop. I've had more problems with both windows and linux on this machine than on any other (well if we only count windows xp that is).
How I wish I had a mac right now...and before you ask: no I can't use my iBook as vmware wont run on a G4 processor.

On the topic of proverbs

Here are a few more (serious ones):

"A drowning man is not troubled by rain." - Persian Proverb

"A penny saved is a penny gained." - Scottish Proverb

"A wise man makes his own decisions, an ignorant man follows the public
opinion." - Chinese Proverb

"Advice when most needed is least heeded." - English Proverb

"An ox remains an ox, even if driven to Vienna." - Hungarian Proverb

"As we live, so we learn." - Yiddish Proverb

"Give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day. Teach him how to fish and
he'll eat forever." - Chinese Proverb

"If you believe everything you read, better not read." - Japanese proverb

"It is not fish until it is on the bank." - Irish Proverb

"The wise adapt themselves to circumstances, as water molds itself to
the pitcher." - Chinese Proverb

Quote of the day

"Tension is who you think you should be, relaxation is who you are" - Chinese Proverb (not like these ones)

Testing mail2blogger

I've considered how to increase my blogging without it impacting other tasks and I think I may have found a way.
Normally I blog by sitting down in front of my laptop with something already on my mind. However in most cases what I intended to blog about will have changed quite a few times, simply because I usually get my ideas somewhere else than in front of the laptop. It probably has something to do me being distracted from my tain of thought either by work stuff or some news or other.
Now I'm testing out mail2blogger from my mobile, since i will be able to write a blog entry e.g. on the tube and then send it off once i get network coverage again.
The last few times where I've used my phone to type up a blog post, I thought i had to sync the note to my laptop and then copy-paste it to blogger.com.
If this works it'll make blogging so much easier. Just be thankfull that I don't have a camera on the phone and would post loads of irrelevant pictures :) For now I have to stick with irrelevant text...

Insite Vision

AMEX:ISV

There was quite a bit of activity around this stock yesterday. They got $60M through a "Non-Recourse Note Offering" which made the price jump about $0.09. This may not sound as much, but given the price at closing on Friday was $0.61 it's a nice 15% gain in a day.

Unfortunately I haven't invested that heavily in ISV, so my gain only amounted to around $9.90 so far. I do believe however, that this stock could see a big gain in the future, as they have a some promising product candidates in the pipeline. Some of the extra money with help advance these products, though it seems they may still need a few years to make it to the market, so the question is how long to wait

The Non-Recourse Note Offering is basically a loan guaranteed in the royalties of a product currently in the market, so as with so many other things, this could easily go belly-up. If the royalties start to falter so it will not cover the principal and interest on the loan, the rest of the company could be in big trouble. This is also the case with the products in the pipeline, as no-one yet knows how viable they are. They could all be flops or they could all be hits. Unfortunately in that sort of market there's little in between those two things.

I'm going to hang on to my few stocks a bit longer. At least until they've revealed their fourth quarter and full year earnings later today :) hoping it's good news.

GoldSpring, Inc.

OTCBB:GSPG

Could this be a goldmine in more sense than one? Well..that's what I'm hoping for at the moment. This stock is what is called a "penny stock" (IFAIK) since it's trading around 2c at the moment.

Why is this interesting? On one hand, it's a very risky stock as the company has basically just been burning money the last few years without any results yet, and the areas they own and are currently test-drilling might turn out not to be viable for mining. On the other hand big risk normally also means potential big reward, and if they do find enough gold, silver etc. to start mining, the company value, and also the stock price, could go through the roof. In this case "going through the roof" might just mean that the stock ends up at $2, and though not a lot compared to many other companies this would still be 100x the original price, turning my $160 into $16,000 :). Where it might end up, I have no idea, but even a smaller jump to just 20c would still increase my investment quite nicely.

Then again the result could be that they find nothing and that the stock ends up being worthless..but that's part of the game and therefore an accepted risk, even though the risk in this case might be much greater than any of the other stocks I own. That's why I haven't gone "all in" on this one.

At the moment it's up around 13% since I bought it, which is nice, but I'm holding back to see if it does take off at some point.

Seriously Easy Backup Solution

I was messing around with the Apple Time Machine to try and get it to backup to my NAS-like network device (the Linksys NSLU2) but with the latest update (10.5.2) the simple hack of allowing non-supported drives to be seen by time machine doesn't work. It only works if you've managed to use the hack before the update and that way already have a time machine backup on a network drive. I haven't, and the "new" hack that's out was a bit too much of a hassle.

Reading through some comments somewhere on the 'net, I followed a link to CrashPlan which is an "Automatic Offsite Backup" tool. The beauty of the beast is that (apart from $20 in license per computer you want to backup) it can be free to use! You can choose to use their central backup server ($0.10 per GB, min $5 per month) or if you have multiple computers you can use the software to backup from one to another. The files are encrypted with a private key, and compressed, before they're send off, so there's even an option of having your files backup on a friends computer - without worrying about his security setup, virus attacks etc.

The software is awailable for OS X, Linux and Windows, and I've set it up on an iBook G4 and a Dell Latitude running Ubuntu. The only problem I had installing it on my Ubuntu laptop, was that first I didn't have a new enough Java (needs 1.5+) and second it wouldn't recognise it once I installed it. In the end I settled for having the installer download it for me, but not even that worked as the server/engine part of the software would start. Unfortunately nothing was mentioned in log-files, FAQs or other logical places, about the server not wanting to start up, so after a bit of pocking around I tried to change the java path in "install.vars" to where I had installed jdk 1.6.0. That got the server part up and running, and once that was done it was no problem at all getting the two machines linked up and backing up my mac to my linux. The nice thing is, that since they're both on the same local network CrashPlan wont need to use my broadband to transfer the files, and they were send over the wireless in no time :)

Now, the docs coming with the linux install has description of how to connect to a CrashPlan engine (the server bit of the software) on a head-less server (i.e. no gui) so in theory I should be able to set it up on my Textdrive server (if the sysadmins will allow me and I can get a designated port. The port should be easy as I've previously gotten a dedicated port for my own webserver while I was playing around with ruby :) to use the server as a backup might be harder as they have their own remote-backup solution). However, I think I might just do with my local backup for now, or perhaps arrange to host backups for some of the family in return for them hosting mine...

Either way you look at it, CrashPlan is a seriously cool piece of kit, and should be well worth the $20 price tag (you can install the software as a "destination only" for free, but then you can't backup that machine anywhere else)

Classic British Quality Humour

And most likely spot on in terms of how the sub-prime market actually worked...

I just love the bit that what persuaded people to buy sub-prime debt was only due to the naming of the funds selling them :)

Linux wins in ease of use

I've got this really cheap HP Deskjet F2180 (around 25-30 GBP) which have caused me all sorts of problems.

On windows, it installs with a ton of extra software and was the cause of a series of blue-screens (which I find rare on most XP systems). Those blue-screens might have been part of the reason my work laptop ended up in a fubar-state after trying the in-build "system restore" to get rid of crappy drivers (hp printer, bluetooth dongle(s) and 3G modem). Anyway, it was a hassle to get to work on windows, involving installing loads of software and drivers...I mainly wanted to print, so I could have lived with a "printer only" install with less drivers and fluff.

On OS X i had to use the software on the CD, which meant the same thing as on windows; loads of unnecessary software and drivers. At least it didn't crash the system, but having un-installed and later re-installed, I couldn't get the printer to work the last time round. To be fair, this was on the way out the door to the airport, with a hope of being able to print my own boarding pass...never got it to print, but got to the airport in time :)

On Linux, I expected a lot of hassle (the printer most likely being a "windows only" printer etc.) but wanted to give it a shot before i tried installing it on the iBook again. To my big surprise a pop-up appeared shortly after having plug in the printer, with a message that the HP 2100 series printer was ready for printing!. Imagine my joy when it actually printed too! It simply just worked out of the box...amazing stuff.

So in my small experiment getting my cheap HP printer to work, Linux had the easiest, fastest and most enjoyable way of getting it working. Now I know the printer does much more than just print, and I'm not sure the scanner will be equally simple to setup, but that wasn't the point of this exercise. It was just getting access to print. I don't mind the extra features requiring extra software etc., but it should by now by possible to simply plug in a printer and start printing no matter which printer and/or operating system.