Naija Elections and CNBC Contest

Currently in the top 15% (with 9.12% return) of the competition not bad for being 100% in cash! The market hit new highs on Friday and I bailed. So I am now waiting for an opportunity to get back in, and the 42 points decline so far today is not it.
I do have a lot of ideas to research though, which should enable me to get back into the market soon, here are some of them:

Top 20 most volatile stocks:
WFMI,SNDK,NVDA,SANM, AV, DYN,AMZN, GTW, HAR,NOVL, HSP, ADCT,WMB,YHOO, ANDW, BRCM, CTXS, CTSH, TLAB and SHLD

Short Squeeze or Insider buying:
TWX,JAS,AVID,UTEK,PRST,ESIO,USMO,CVO, CACC,BHS

Other ideas and other people's portfolios:
MOT, TM,SLG,FD,CYBX,SYMC,REGN,IMCL,GS,COF,FWLT,SGR,C

Naija Elections:
Feel, like I should comment on the Nigerian elections, although my interest is strictly economic as opposed to being political. Y'ardua has been declared the winner of Naija's election. However, I would like to call on the loosers ( I meant guys lucky enough not to win) e.g. Pat Utomi, to expend their passion for Nigeria in other ways. Ways that can go a long way in actualizing their vision for the country outside the purview of the government. Our people needs to learn that our "saviour" is most likely not going to come from the realm of politics. Politics as we know it is simply too dirty as played our society.

Therefore instead of becoming jaded, let us see business the path to Nigeria's freedom and the creation of economic value as the path to Nigeria's greatness.

Learning requires focus and attention

CNBC Contest
With a return of about 7% in 6 weeks, the return on this contest is not bad, however, it is the lack of focus and concentration that is preventing me from optimizing my learning. Hence, let professionals manage your real money or you can get burned easy.

Currently I am in the top 18% with a 7.68% return.

Sold a bunch for violating the 3% loss rule, so with about 500K in cash, I had to shop. Now having the time and inclination to do serious research, I chose the following for the following reasons:

AUY ( Gold is a measure of safety, when high oil prices leads to inflationary pressures)
DVN (Possible takeover target in the energy sector)
GT (Tyres is a sector, I wish I have stayed in since the beginning)
? - I need a biotech stock, so I will look around for something I like today.

Lessons Learnt

It is week 4, of the CNBC stock contest, and although not close to the leaders by any stretch of the imagination, it is time to take stock of lessons learnt so far.

1. Invest, with professionals - except one develops discipline in terms of time and approach to the stock market, my level of interest will vary a lot. Hence, real money is better of with a professional, even if you think you can beat the professionals.
2. Invest play money yourself and use it as a benchmark against the professionals managing your money. With a return of 4.7% in 4 weeks, if my real money works that hard, I will be happy.
3. Have a clear strategy, be disciplined and follow your own compass, sticking to my rules, have produced consistent, if not spectacular returns and most importantly they have allowed me not to loose money.

Sure, there are many more lessons to come and I will keep y'all posted.
current return 4.7%, ranking -top 22%.

Help - If you are aware of leading indicator of how the market will do in the next week or so timeframe, please share it with me. Including ideas like measuring overall options play etc.

Bye Bye Goldman, Uncle Ben Blues

Thanks to Uncle Ben's omnious comments, Goldman Sachs has now broken the rules, which is, down 3% and you are gonners.
In my guts I will not want to sell this stock, I think it is a good holding and the performance of the underlying company has not been bad either.
But this is the reality of the discipline of trading that I am trying to learn in the game (CNBC contest), have a simple set of rules, stick to them and trust your guts.

A lot of things I have been reading lately, leads to the conclusion, independent thinkers and travellers win, even if they don't win on other people's measurement, they win having done it their way.

Mundane Report:
I am still top 25%, wilth only about 45K gain in my porfolio, which means people are not gaining that much more. However, due to the selling rules I am now sitting in ~50% cash, which means I have to go shopping again, maybe by the weekend.

If you have a strategy for reading how the market is going to perform one or two weeks out, please share :)

~S

Restrategize, Reload or Stick to your guns - CNBC Contest

Top 24, this weeks performance -1.13, total portfolio return 1.17%.
This week was not pretty with loses across the board, I had to cut my loses on some of my position, that were loosing more than 3%.
Overall, the more I learn about the game, the more I am conviced my strategy is not optimized to win. However, my goal is to learn, so we'll see how we do next week, and if we need to tweak the strategy.

Week in Review - CNBC Contest

Thanks Don, T and Ira for your comments.

I ended the week in the top 20% (2.33% return), and my plan is to spend the weekend, pruning my positions.
How?

1. Sell anything with close to 3% loss ( here, I hope to learn the discipline of sticking to strategy)
2. Buy anything that looks like a sure win for the next week and better than the worst thing in my portfolio.

Based on Ira's and Don comments, that this is a momentum game and not a strategy play, I would need to consider buying LEND and Sell CRM down 1.63%.

Hmnn, LEND - everybody and the kitchen sink is playing the sub prime game, and I can't quite figure out how to research the fact that the momentum/upside will be there.

CRM - fundamentally is good, and my thesis may hold over 10 weeks, the question is where will we end the week.

Decision, give it a day, do more homework on LEND and the sub prime sector as a whole, are they oversold? Is there a basket to diversify risk?
Gas is almost $3 in myneighbourhood, what is the outlook for oil and gas, next week.
In addition, I am at about 10% cash, which is where, I will like to be to be able to take advantage of a sudden downturn if it happens.

Top 20% is not bad for simply wanting to learn. So as not be a pig, it is do nothing weekend.

Cheers!

Last of the shopping spree - CNBC Contest

First, I should report that I am now in the top 25%. Not surprising.

I suspect the main reason is because I am not full invested, I still have about $400K fake cash left. Therefore, it is time to go shopping. My strategy this time is to do a market sweep because 60% of a stock performance is based on its sector. I included 2 of Cramer's recommendations - after doing my homework of course.

So here are the picks and the reasons:
Goodyear Tire (GT) - token purchase a la Cramer
Medco Health (MHS) - ditto, although the Healtcare sector is somewhere in the middle, the stock did not stand out
Next, I try to buy a bucket of minerals with XLE, but you can't buy anything but stocks, so I chose the following as a substitute.
Phelps Dogde (PD) - Mining stood out in analysis, and may be in consolidation mode
XOM -oil is up this morning ($61/barrel), might as well pick the granddaddy of them all
AMD - 52 weeks low? what? I am taking a risk on this one, will do more research this weekend to determine if it really needs to be here
Diageo (DEO) - worst of the worst, here I was going for a pick in a sector that is not doing well now, I intend to pick the best of the worst, ROX, however its capitalization is too small for CNBC, so I settled on DEO.
Wayeheurser (WY) my token NW stock is actually in a good sector, the only big name in the tree sector.
AIG - a worst of the best approach due to capitalization pick, alternative to VTKI

I should be almost as fully invested as I set out to be by now, so expect more sporadic postings on prunings et al.

CNBC Challenge - What I hope to learn

Currently ranked top 4% with a one day $10,430 gain, I feel pretty cool for a minute. [ I know there are at least 80,000 people in the competition] however, this is probably as high as I would get. Why? I realize that to win in this kind of competition one has to use an extreme strategy.
An effective strategy will be, some like buying the lowest stock price that is available (you can't trade penny stocks), that you think, will go up the highest in the next day or two, be fully invested and dump it, when you have your gain.

I may be wrong, but we'll see. What I hope to learn though is - what kind of return can one get from an aggressive/safety strategy. Slightly diversified, but go for battered stocks and dump anything that looses more than 5%.

Todays Trades & Why
CRM (Salesforce.com) - Software as a Service is huge and I expect some recovery from recent beatdowns.
CSL (Carlisle) - A secret hedge fund, try to get a clean image, something tells me these guys have something up thier sleeves
NXG (Northgate) & OXY (Occidental) - now that it is all about subprime lenders, time to get into Natural resources

My goal is to be 85-95% fully invested, so I still have some more shopping to do. I will keep y'all posted and do post your own trades.

Trade Stock with Play Money - Win a Million Bucks

The CNBC stock trading competition is on once again. And this time instead of a maserati, you get a cool million dollars.
Trading in a down market for quick gains, is essentially crap shoot, however, I think one can learn a thing or two about the market.
This is to encourage you to join the game. I will blog about my choices and why and I hope you can join me too.
First trades -- 1000 shares of Goldman Sachs (GS) and 1000 shares of Sears Holding (SHLD).
Why? GS is the best managed brokerage; and SHLD is an investment holding company disguising as a retailers. More importantly, I expect both to rebound once the market has hit rock bottom.

Happy Trading!

Update: Mad Money Challenge...Any news?

It will be interesting of participants can gist us of their returns in the Jim Cramer mad money challenge..Kindly give us your biggest winner and losers and lessons learnt. Even though I didn't participate because I already run another virtual mutual fund where I practice my stock picking skills (believe me you will be rich if you invested with me early this year-laughs), where I am up 10% plus to date, you can also check my little fund out on (You will need to paste this one at a time) . http://www.marketocracy.com/cgi-
bin/WebObjects/Portfolio.woa/ps/FundPublicPage/source=
ImAbAgLjEcGiBnCdMaKiAbDd

Test Trading

I remember a while back a posting on what will you do with $2000. And I think a couple of people mentioned investing. What will you do with $100,000?
Which lead me to this post, I do tivo Jim Cramer's mad money, although I usually end up seeing one or two episodes per week. Anyways, there is this new competition that let you match your wits with other traders with play money at - http://www.madmoneychallenge.com

Here is my proposition - if you are interested, why don't you register
More importantly why don't you post your rationale for your trades here on this blog.

I think this would be fun, just to 1) Improve knowledge of investing and trading 2) Learn about your investment style and personality 3) Risk taker or risk averse etc. and 4) just fun.

Games start Oct 6th. Happy Trading