Gearing up for next week...

28 Apr 4:55am
 Next week's goal is to break 2.8 mil.  I made it to 2.78 this week, but a few of my larger positions lost ground on Thursday and Friday.  Here's a quick overview.  Please bear in mind that my spare time for research has been heavily cramped for the past month or so.  My research lately has consisted of eyeballing the moving averages on Google Finance, and browsing two or three financial websites.  I need to take some time in the near future to clear out a bunch of losing positions, and to find a comparable number of stocks that will grow over the next 30 days.  I've got the lever (2.7 million bucks), I just need the fulcrum (time to find the right stocks):

1.  (VG) short- The Vonage people are fighting tooth and nail to beat their patent-lawsuit problems.  The $1.30 spike on Tue, after the judge gave the company a little slack, put my short position into the red.  Of course, the one-day gains were an overreaction and the stock is back to $3.16 at the end of the week.  I expect to be able cover this at approx $3 sometime in the coming days.  Vonage management is willfully opposed to failure.   I admire them for their guts, but I gotta get out of this short postion.  In fact, with an earnings report coming up and the launch of a new product this very week, I'm gonna have to do a little research into the possibility of buying VG. 

2.  (RADN) long-  Ugh, things were looking so good.  I'm certain all of these fluctuations are based on irrationality.  I'm going to hold this.  RADN jumped $0.30 to $9.36 in a single day, and then overcorrected by almost a dollar for the rest of the week.  Unnatural. 

3. (GROW) long- Down almost 12 percent in two days.  Thanks guys.  The stock will bounce back.  Hopefully with extra momentum.  Of course, this is a mutual fund management company.  Practically a derivative, this stock.  I fully expect to get my $25k back this coming week. 

4. (AGEN) long- Another lost opportunity.  I was busy with real world activites this week.  If I hadn't have been, I would have joined the profit taking that hit this stock the last days of this week.  Antigenics is showing an overall downward trend.  I'll be happy to break even with this.  I've got too much pharmaceutical in my portfolio anyhow. 

5. (QQQQ) long- Cash is a bad investment.  So I'm putting everything I've got here, until I can think about what I'm doing instead of just guessing. 

My short-term goal is $2.8 million.  My long-term plan is to take this portfolio over $3 million, sell everything and then put the money in a few index funds and ETFs.  At that point I'll start looking seriously into individual stocks.  I'll buy shares of whatever I can be dead certain is undervalued, and can be left alone once purchased.

Then I'll ruin everything by short selling in million dollar increments, based on poorly-informed hunches.

-z

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I've been following your portfolio and I wish you luck. You commentary is nice and helps to put your decisions into context.
Posted on Apr 27, 2007 @5:05pm
no 1 on the leaderboard, that's pretty cool. shame this isn't the CNBC challenge here. but hey you never know. i saw the crazy gain you made on the sub-prime new century financial - i missed that one myself, but that was a good call. my eyes on your move, only wish they had a monitoring system here or something.
Posted on Apr 27, 2007 @9:32pm
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About

zenoizen

Current strategy...

1. Reduce losing positions. I've got a slew of stinkers in my portfolio. Many of them are down simply because everything is down. Thing is, I need the cash to pick up a few things that I'm sure are due to move upwards. So, I'm taking some losses to get the needed cash.

2. Buy. Markets are down, but there's no doubt that there is going to be some general upward movement over the summer of 2008. I'm concentrating on ETFs to get the built-in diversification. Plus, I'm also trying to find ways to play different commodities and currencies etc. that will probably gain a few percentages... looks like corn, coal, the dollar and interest rates are the way to go right now...

3. Wait. A lot of the "crap" I'm holding is actually undervalued, and ought to return over the next quarter or two. My excessive shorting of QID will most likely be mitigated in the medium term. Time heals all wounds, they say. Hope they're right!