7/20 - New stocks from screener

Since it's earning season, I figured I'll list out the earning dates for each:

ZIXI - 7/26

FRD - 7/27

GSM - 8/9

HITK - 7/7

USHS - 5/12

BPI - 8/2

STM - 7/26

ZIXI, FRD and HITK are most interesting right now to me.

STM/USHS/BPI are good to watch

DSCO, CSKI, BRD

DSCO: At resistance, with low end at 2.44, currently at 2.47

CSKI: At resistance, with low end at 2.85, currently at 3.07

BRD: Currently on upswing, resistance at 1.91

Some interesting links

50 things to feel great about (if you are in America):

http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2011/07/15/50-things-you-should-feel-great-about.aspx?source=ihpsitth0000001

RIM:

http://m.bgr.com/2011/07/13/rims-inside-story-an-exclusive-look-at-the-rise-and-fall-of-the-company-that-made-smartphones-smart/#share-absolute-div

7/14 - Trades

Bought POL again since it had high volume yesterday and seems like it might break into new highs.

Sold AKAM as it seems to be trending down again, currently lower than EMA10

Sold half of ARO since it's stale, I would buy again if it starts to move.

Initiated a position on ARLP, albeit a relatively small one

CSKI is moving up strongly as well.. maybe I should add more.

7/13 - Potential trades

Somehow I got up early enough for market open today.

Looking to buy some RIMM and potentially sell PLPC. I'm also starting to watch AAPL and GOOG as potential tech stocks to buy.

Watch list for potential other stocks to buy:

FRX, GGAL, RES, CVI, CVH, ARLP

7/7 - Trades

Sold POL, profit taking over 10% - and today it went down against the market which might mean the immediate run up is done. I will monitor this as one of the stocks on my watchlist and screener though.

Bought USHS per last post at 5.13.

7/7 - Watchlist

Do I feel lucky on 7/7? Should I trade?

Anyhow, list of stocks I'm watching that I haven't bought are:

FRX, RES, GGAL, USHS, CVI

The winner from this round is USHS, I think I will put some money in this..

6/28 - Updated stock list

FRX RES WPZ POL TSU GGAL NPO

All of the above stocks have had pretty good price action, but we also just had 2 days of 1%+ so I guess there will be some general market pull back in the next day or so which might give me a good entry point on some of the underlined stocks.

The winner from this round is TSU and RES, I will be watching these two closer than the others immediately.

TSU 5CAPS 65%SC 4AB 4SX 21%IO 0.93PEG

RES 4CAPS 65%SC 3AB 4SX 11%IO 0.69PEG

Currently I own some POL and NPO, both are doing well.

6/28 - Trades

Added another 100 NOK. Nokia is a stock I owned from before, and have some pretty heavy losses in as I bought just before they announced the partnership with Microsoft. Currently at 6.10, rebounding from recent lows of sub-6 I'm hoping they will continue to counter trend up. This is perhaps a trade more on the impulse side but we will see how it goes.

I also bought one contract LNKD put for July 11 expiration at $75 today. LinkedIn is currently priced at $85 after today's 11% run up. I guess I'm willing to bet up to $300 that it won't stay at or above this price for more than 2 weeks. This is my first time trading options so I'm being cautious.

DSCO

DSCO is my largest holding right now. Today despite the market decline it went up 3.33%, although the volume is very low. It's recently been trading between 1.8 to 2.25 back and forth, I'm looking to sell a portion of my stock at 2.25 and buy more around 1.8 and 1.9. Current average at 2.6.

http://www.quote.com/us/stocks/analysts.action?s=DSCO

http://www.nasdaq.com/earnings/analyst_summary.asp?symbol=DSCO&symbol=YRCW&symbol=KOG&symbol=IDN&selected=DSCO

http://moneycentral.msn.com/investor/invsub/analyst/recomnd.asp?symbol=dsco

BRD

Bought 1000 shares after selling my position in CDE. I feel that BRD is better situated as a precious metal play right now as its priced at a major support at the 1.57 level after today's drop.

If it breaks this support then I will sell, setting stop at 1.49. Yes, I guess this more or less counts as an impulse buy, but this stock has been on my watchlist for some time.

http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2010/12/22/the-top-10-gold-and-silver-stocks-for-2011.aspx

http://www.stoxline.com/quote.php?symbol=brd: SELL

http://www.stockconsultant.com/consultnow/basicplus.cgi?symbol=brd: 75%

http://americanbulls.com/StockPage.asp?CompanyTicker=BRD&MarketTicker=AMEX&Typ=S: SELLIF

6/21 - Stocks to watch

My new screener which is a kind of a jack of all trades screener yielded a few results.. Highest 20% in industry for price movement, EPS, EPS growth 1Y, EPS growth 3Y, insider shares bought, technical indicator up and lowest 40% P/E:

PLPC - 4CAPS, HOLD, 50%SC, 5.27M shares, 41%IO

RES - 4CAPS, WAIT, 60%SC, 148M shares, 28%IO

PLPC has a better chart for now, just broke the 50 and 20 day SMA. I think I will buy some shares of this. Technical stuff:

http://www.stoxline.com/quote.php?symbol=PLPC

http://americanbulls.com/StockPage.asp?CompanyTicker=PLPC&MarketTicker=NASD&TYP=S

http://www.stockconsultant.com/consultnow/basicplus.cgi?&symbol=PLPC

P - Pandora, one of my favorite companies recently IPO'd. I need to do more research here to figure out what price level this becomes a good buy, but I will be watching this one. Unfortunately all of CAPS seem to think this company is a joke.

My current 'speculative' positions

Stock - M.Value - C.Basis - #Shares
NBG - $446.22 - 425.99 - 333
PBTH - $460.00 - 459.99 - 100
SVNT - $691.00 - $719.99 - 100

6/17 - Stock trades

NPO - 25 shares @ $46

POL - 100 shares @ $14.49

POL was the winner of my first round of stock picks.

NPO I bought because it just hit 52 week high and is among the stocks that fit the criteria as previously mentioned.

Currently I'm slightly down on both of these as the market overall declined after I bought them in the morning. I've set stops for these stocks at around 7% or so loss.

2011/6/16 Watchlist

This is a set of stocks that passed the two screeners I made that was meant to more or less get the CASLI criteria, and also passed my own initial screening:

AHT, GGAL, IPGP, NPO, POL, TSU

Of these, after using the usual research tools I narrowed it down to just POL that I will do focus on for today..

The system for research

Ideally (and hopefully I will stick more to this ideal), the stocks I pick will fit each of these criteria:
(Note, a lot of this is straight out of the CANSLIM system by William O'Neil according to the book Market Wizards)

1. Current EPS in the 80+ percentile range
2. Annual EPS growth, check last year growth vs. 5 year average growth
3. New - New product or service, new market.. etc
4. Shares outstanding (less than 25mil, average 12mil, median 4.6mil)
5. Leader in relative strength (high performers)
6. Institutional sponsorship.. prefer to have a good amount but not too high
7. Market - The current market situation and technicals

I guess this is the 7 things I'll start with. A simple stock screener could do about 5 of the 7 letters.. (all except N, M.. so I guess that spells CASLI)

For the technical analysis of the stock I will for now defer to sites like http://americanbulls.com and http://stockconsultant.com. For N I will actually go visit the company website and research news I suppose.

Another aspect of this is diversification. There are arguments for and against diversification, and here are the best ones I've heard:

FOR: It's important to diversify, not only in the stocks you pick but also in how correlated each of the stocks in your portfolio is. As such, it's important to diversify across markets, across countries.. etc.

AGAINST: Diversity is a hedge for ignorance. If you know what you are doing and are doing the right amount of research, it's actually a good thing to have all of your eggs in just a few baskets. Obviously diversity still becomes more important as you are managing more money.

Finally, there is this idea of speculation. Up until now every criteria I listed above are about fundamentals or technicals, but there is also a camp of people who believe that you can make a lot of money by speculating and timing the trades. This is probably most true for biomed companies, where news such as FDA approval could make your stock a ten bagger over night. So if I were to play such a market, one might argue that I simply put a bit of money in each of these 'small bets' that may become big.

Anyway, as I progress I hope to refine this system more. For now I have a general idea that except for the SPEC-plays, I will try to follow the above CANSLIM criteria for stock picking. And I will hopefully limit the amount of SPEC plays in my portfolio to about 20-40%.

A new hope?

The markets have not been kind to me this year. Even though the market's overall up in the year, I'm overall down. In reflection, I think this is mainly because of three things:
1. Catching falling knives, then doubling down to catch some more
2. Not diversified enough, I had a few 'big bets' and most of them went to hell (look up CSKI's chart for this year and you'll see what I mean)
3. Not enough research, buying on impulse.. etc.

I'm starting this blog to document the research of stocks I do as well as the reasoning behind every purchase. Hopefully this is a forcing function for me to correct the 3 behaviors above.