Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Following the market

I know some of yall don't know me anywhere but here sokay, as these blogs continue you will learn more and more about me and the twisted way my mind works sometimes. Not talking about that today though I'll do one of those ramblers later.

I happen to trade a few stocks here and there on the net, now I had stopped investing after 05 because I thought the market was at a shakey point and I didn't like how it was looking. Then after a slow start in 06 I used up most of our savings(I'm married remember seperated but married and wasn't seperated in 06) in a job market that had started to dry up(nothing like what it is now, but for the type of job I was looking for yeah weren't a lot of openings) but as most folks say have 6 months of savings welp I had that easily. But I digress like I said I stopped investing after 05 because I realised the bubble that was about to burst and I wanted no part of it, what I already owned I would sell when they hit certain prices(because for most of them I had already cashed in my profit so anything I sold was just money in the bank) but no new purchases. As you can see 4 years later I seemed to have made a wise decision. So now because the market tanked(not crashed, crashed would have been all of them damn near penny stocks, didn't happen wasn't a crash) it is one hell of a buying oppurtunity which I have taken slight advantage of I bought a few companies that I felt got the hell beat out of them, for some fairly for others they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I wasn't perfect there were some companies that I wanted in on but was not patient enough for(it happens) but I'm pausing for a minute, I subscribe to the 6 month evaluation theory. I have bought some companies, they have fluctuated in price up and down(most of them mostly up a few of them have been on the roller coaster, especially one that may end up a wasted 80 bucks but o well) but for the most part it seems I have made some good choices. As such watching the market make it's fluctuation but it's slow and steady move upward I am happy. Now will I be so in 6 months I believe so. I think I positioned myself nicely yes I would love to have gotten into a few more sectors, but the most important thing when you invest is pick your price range and stick to it.

(PSA the stocks I am about to talk about were my choices and in no way shape or form am I making an endorsement of them. If you do your own research and decide you like the following stocks so be it, but I repeat I am not recommending these stocks for anyone else. I am just recounting my experiences ONLY).

So what stocks did I buy into, well I'm glad you asked:

Ford motor co del com par (F:NYSE): ford was the first stock I bought getting my feet wet again and I will admit it I chased. Boy did I chase I didn't set a limit price or anything the price I got in at was $2.70 which considering it's current price wasn't bad but since it dropped down to 1.01 later I should have waited. But hey it's a game of chance sometimes and well I ain made I'm in the green now thats all that matters.

E*trade financial corp com (ETFC:Nasdaq): E*trade was actually the second stop purchase but not the second one I put an order in for. I basically put E*trade in for another market order but only because I figured I was willing to ride the roller coaster with it's current average price paid $1.26 a share, yes it dipped lower but hey I got a decent price and thats all I care about.

General Motors corp com (GM:NYSE): GM is only third because it took and extra few days for it to hit my price now yes it has been beated down lately but in my eyes $1.80 a share for what I expected to regain it's footing and be soaring again in the next 3-5 years was a good price. Yes they have been beaten up a little bit lately but just like Ford I expect them to turn it around.

Sirius XM radio inc com (SIRI:Nasdaq): I won't lie sirius was a thumbing my nose at the "expert advice" simply because I read an article sirius which bought up it's only competition and appears to be keeping it's customer base steady and putting out a good product was a smarter buy at $.13 a share then was google in trying economic times at $300+. Of course not how the experts saw it and looking at todays price I was right. Now I have no clue what this will look like in a few months but if it continues to climb out of the doldrums man will I look like a genius.

Washington Mutual inc (Wamuq:other OTC): This is a long shot pick I won't lie and claim that I had research that said oh wamu is gonna turn it around, like I thought sirius would nope this one was just a well known company that had gotten beat down and was so cheap again whats 80 bucks if it shoots the moon? at a price of $.05 really what did I have to lose if it hit's $1.00 thats 20 times what I put in, hell for that one doesn't matter how long it takes I can wait that out. And if it blows up in my face wow I missed going to the movies a few times, meh if you don't go for the home runs every once in a while whats the use of stepping up to the plate huh?

Fannie Mae com (FNM:NYSE): Fannie I let make a few moves upward before I bought now it did retreat after I bought it which is okay, again I don't expect everything to fly up it would be nice, but it's unrealistic. But at $.82 a share it had shown some nice upward moves and is once again above what I initially paid for it.

Freddie mac (FRE:NYSE): Fredro is the pause stock yup the last one I bought. I was a little more patient with freddie, don't ask me why I just was I set the price lower then fannie and at $.70 all that can be said it dude you should learn a little patience.

Thats it thats all I bought since january of this year those are the prices I paid as well as each stocks ticker symbol so if you ever wanna see how ya boy is doing with his picks each week or maybe in 6 months like I myself plan to(6 months from either the first or last purchase I haven't decided yet, I know pitiful.). Most people won't tell ya the price they got in on because well they wanna sound brilliant, me I want you to be able to figure out my break even point and see how I handled my rocky situations or success. I learned a lot of what I learned about investing from books and blogs, most of them would talk about stocks and would give you arbitrary numbers that of course may or may not have had a basis in reality.

Now if I later find out I ain allowed to do that I'll stop(I don't think I'm not allowed to give a stock price on a previous date, I just know your not supposed to not mention if you own a stock when your talking about it) but like I said that gives you a starting point as well as gives you the chance to say check my math. So you know I'm not pulling a bernie madoff talking about "if I told you how I did it I'd have to kill ya", anyway I hope if your also taking the plunge into the market at this time your stocks are doing well.

Sunday, April 12, 2009

Warning to People using Symantec family of software

Now I won't lie I have used the Symantec family of products for years(norton for those who don't know the company name) and usually they serve me well, hell my main computer has been running problem free for like 3 years now with Norton internet security 06 on it. Unfortunately at some point in time in the last 6 months some how those products got corrupted. Now initially I wasn't sure what it was, since most of my stuff worked I didn't really pay much attention.
I mean my laptop has vista on it and since most of the issues started on my laptop of course like everyone else what did I blame vista with it's nosey and dysfunctional self(I know I know now I have to apologize to vista) so after figuring out a few ways around said issues on the laptop at first I thought nothing of it. Then all the sudden my desktop started acting up. What do I mean by acting up:

New versions of programs that I already had installed were not working and could not access the internet.

Anything I downloaded from the internet either would not complete or else once downloaded could not finish their processes if internet access was required.

Programs that you already have loaded cannot download new updates or check for updates after a few weeks.

Now I know this could have been a lot of things, and with my laptop having vista on it some of it was gonna be blame on the invasive UAC(user access control) because it does have a tendency to block programs even if you have given them permission because "it knows better then you". But I had turned it off for a while with no luck in the programs I recently downloaded not working department, so it wasn't UAC. Now the other dead give away that it was something that loaded up at the start was the fact that everything worked in safe mode and I do mean everything. When I had IE 8 installed that worked, when I installed firefox because IE8 wasn't working that worked, google chrome worked in safe mode. Plus even Windows messenger couldn't upgrade itself in regular or safe mode(which I am gonna check now and see if that has changed but of course if it hasn't then I can't blame symantec for that). But as I said after testing a few theories and doing the go into safe mode and remove everything that was added after the IE8 upgrade AND removing every vista update since Jan 1st 2008. Also going into configuration mode and turning off damn near everything that wasn't running in safe mode well I had two choices: A full reload (and I have waaaaay to much data on my laptop to do that) or else find a way to completely remove norton.

Option B made the best sense at first now of course if that didn't work yep had to do the full reload, and trust me I would be waiting on that if I gotta reload my laptop anyway I might as well upgrade the hard drive I have an 80 gig in here now(seperated into to 30~ gig partitions) and if I have to reload it anyway I am going to go ahead and toss a 320 GB hard drive in here (or larger if I can find one) and have me a portable super porn machine. Yeah yeah I know how much porn does one man need allow me to put a few more hard drives in both my computers and we will see. Muahahahahahaa.

But this was just an update for those who may be running into a similar issue, if you are go to symantecs site and type in norton removal tool in the search bar. Pick the version of the remover for which ever version of norton you have(they do it by years, the first one does from 09-04 I think, and each one hops back one year from that starting date IE 08-03, 07-02 and so on and so forth) now once you do this don't forget to either reinstall norton(their suggestion depending on how long you had yours might be an option if your still within either your free trial or your subscription date if you decided to subscribe) or else find a new virus scanner program(if you know of a good one I would suggest you use it, I'm gonna look into a few myself). By the way if anything pops up trying to tell you you have a virus do not use it, it probably is a virus or malware. Most people hate pop ups so a reputable company is not gonna take the chance at turning you away.

Again this is not a Bash Symantec thread this is a if your having a similar problem this is your cheap solution so you don't have to go to best buy and have them charge you 100+ to fix it blog. Now if your not comfortable doing this go to best buy, or you local computer store that you trust and let them fix it. The benefit of the paid virus scanners is of course since your paying they tend to give you more comprehensive and user friendly products, the problem with them is their prices are high and if you lose your product code, or registration number their gonna want more money again.

I hope this helps if you had or run into a similar problem

Thursday, April 9, 2009

The emperor still has no clothes

I don't know about you but back in late 99, early 2000 I started investing for the first time. Now when I started invested like any other bright eyed and bushy tailed rookie I would watch the various financial channels, and hang on the commentators every word like it was gospel. I'm sure I'm not alone in this initial fascination with these people who are on TV and talk about stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and commodities. Now as I was listening, memorizing what they had to say, and takin notes here and that for stocks I might wanna purchase later I would constantly hear one phrase being repeated over and over again:


Do your DUE DILIGENCE before ever investing in a position

Wow I was amazed I was like hmm this must be important, so I treated it like sage advice. But as I started to take this sage advice I began to realize something if I did do my own research(thats what due diligence means) many times what they were saying on TV about the company and what I would come up with on my own would not match up. Now granted we can all read numbers differently, and maybe the info I got was just a better hunch on my part then what they got. But then I started to notice a pattern, it wasn't just off it was almost deliberately off. Some of the things they were saying were in essence meant to get people to react a certain way, as if they were being told what to say and how to present things instead of doing the due diligence as they were instructing you to do.

Now yes of course some of this can't be helped I mean some companies for the longest time during the early part of the 2000's were masters of the accounting tricks. It started with enron, then it crept into the housing bubble, and now it has fully reared it's ugly head in the mortgage crisis. And do you know what the funniest thing is, if you go back and listen to the "analysts" on most of the financial channels, they didn't seem to see a single thing wrong. They were all too happy to inform you about the new math and the new metrics, and how you could ignore old methods of capitalization and valuation because we were in a brave new world.

Problem with their brave new world, it seems math didn't exist in their brave new world. Okay that is slightly unfair math did exist just not 1+1=2 math or if jimmy has $5.00 and he goes to the store and wants to buy a few snacks and an apple costs .75, a bag of chips costs .35, a soda costs 1.35(remember when a soda was only like 1.00 tops with tax wow) and a pack of cupcakes is like 1.50(let's not even talk about cupcakes). well the first part of the question of course would be does little jimmy have enough. Now he's got 5 bucks looks like he should have enough right if he gets one of each he should be straight right be about 3.95. thats regular math, thats the math we would have gotten a 100% on in grade school.

Thats not the math they were using, because they would be talking about little jimmy having that same 5 dollars to buy those same items at that same prices but tripling how much he bought, and saying it's okay if we know he's only got 5 bucks because we're on that new math and mystically magically in a few days, weeks, months yadda yadda little jimmy will magically have turned that into a 50 dollar profit. Okay slight simplification on how he would have done it but NOT on the attitude. Now the fact that up until saaaaay february of 08 most of these guys had no clue how bad things had gotten were still talking up these companies who were about to tank due to credit default swaps, and being undercapitalized for the amount of debt they had taken on, you would think that they would be A sorry as all hell because the looked like grade A fools and B more vigilant about what was going on after that point. But no most of them had that same mindset immediately after the crisis hell many of them continually look shell shocked.

To make matters worse many of them still want us to believe they have some amount of expertise in the subjects that they are speaking. Ladies and gents if say me or you blew it as bad as they blew it we would be out of a job. You saw the coach of the detroit lions, hell the interim coach neither one could win a game all year they both got the axe, neither one of them cost their teams the amount of money the blunders in the financial market cost. I mean yeah the owner may look at his 3-4 or 500 million dollar investment with it's 300 million dollar payroll and think damn did I waste my money this year. But as the arizona cardinals showed(as did the stl rams, oakland raiders, tampa bay buccaneers, boston celtics, tampa bay rays, boston red sox and on and on and on) you can have a bad year, or a string of bad years and then the next year catch fire and whip either everybody in your path or everybody but 1 team. So you might dump the coach but maybe with the right leadership your players can go from bums to heroes. and if you did decide to give the current coach another chance humble pie would be his everyday dish.

Not the idiots on the financial channels, yeah they did some mea culpa's for a few days but as I was watching a promo for one of the shows(today it was suze orman but some days it's kramer, or maybe the closing bell yadda yadda) and she was like let me tell you what you and everybody else was doing wrong. And I'm looking and I say, um if the persons answer isn't " Listening to you suze" they ain learned nothing over the last few years. Because most folks were calling suze, or they were calling kramer, or they were tuning in to bloomberg, CNBC, Fox business what have you, only to get information from people who have proven to know no more if not even less then the people watching them. Because it seems for some of them the fact that they got to smooze with some of the big wigs they forget to check and see if the persons darting eyes looked energetic or nervous, was it actually hot in the room or was the person panicking.

I call this the emperor has no clothes because these folks are at it again. These guys are talking like they have all this expertise that you should listen to when, the time to have exhibited expertise has passed and these folks ladies and gentleman failed that test miserably. They weren't just surprised at the level of chaos in the financial world they had no idea how it had gotten there. I mean think about it if you did something every day or your life, and were paying attention to how things worked the ebbs and flows wouldn't you through nothing else but watching it over time see when things were maybe going a little off? Shouldn't you at least have had an inkling that hmm damn I mean I hope I'm wrong but this just doesn't smell right?

Or maybe I am expecting something else of these talking heads that is unfair, some common human decency and humility. If you screw up apologize and get down off your soap box and join the rest of the crowd as we try to fix the mess. Don't act like nothing went wrong and it's cool again for you to act all intelligent and high and mighty. Sorry you had your chance to be soothsayer of the economic world, but if your barely doing better then a dart thrown at the stock section of the paper why exactly should I listen to you? Everybody looks good when the market is steadily going up, only people who can guage whats good or bad, and will recover faster or not at all when this are looking bad get "authority" credit.

Saturday, April 4, 2009

Whats poppin

Another day another new blog. Okay so who am I hi names primal, you can call me prime, you can call me data, you can call me primal. No it's not my real name it's a name I came up with way back in like 1995-96 when I first signed on to AOL. You wanna know what it stands for ask me. Okay where am I from, I currently live in memphis tn but I was raised in the north east, my try state area would be new york, new jersey, and pennsylvania. But I haven't set foot in NY in at least 10 years, haven't set foot in philly in 11 years and I haven't set foot in the state of new jersey in like 6 years.

I'm a 34 year old black male, married but seperated(yes I could put complicated but hell everybody always wonders what that means, so I figure just tell folks and they can ask again in the future) no kids. I have some college(ie went didn't graduate, yes I was one of those constant partiers), I love to read, play video games, and I am a rather curious person.

What will I blog about, pretty much anything. Granted due to some of the rules posted I will have to cut down on my profanity, I won't post any videos on my page, I will link the hell out of them though. I will of course moderate the comments, while I hate deleting people because I am a firm believer in freedom of speech if I'm not cussing up a storm I'm not gonna let you do it either. If you have an opinion feel free to leave it, you got a point of view be my guest. You got yours, I got mine, somebody else has theirs. The sign of intelligent people is not the ability to speak but the ability to speak civilly even when they do not agree. Hell two bears understand each other but if all their doing is growling at each other until they try to maul the hell out of themselves really is that civil.

What do I like, broad question you ever wanna know feel free to ask, my only request is if it isn't part of the topic of the blog please stay at least close to the topic, I mean I tend to be rambling as it is but I usually keep my blogs withing a certain framework loose frame work but framework none the less. If I talk about something I give my opinion thats all, not an endorsement other then to say I like or enjoy it, not a recommendation, and damn sure not a call for zombie like following. I'm usually a pretty laid back person as long as your not here to do nothing but piss me off.

I have a lot of blogs out here in cyberland if you ever wanna know what else I have said or done, see the name at the top google it and you will most likely find me. At this moment in time I speak two languages english and bad english so if you see something in spanish(other then some BS spanglish), french, german, what have you it probably ain me. And as I have had this name for the longest time I may just take offense to someone borrowing one of my preferred nom de plumes, monikers etc. I put a fair amount of thought into this originally(most of the ones that appeared after this were just some sort of denominal addition to the original name) reason being if I want to get to know you I want to be able to say hey yeah this is why I thought this up not oh well I flipped a coin and it landed in a puddle of dog crap so this why I'm mean. Even though that coin flip technically would be kinda interesting because the next question is so did you dig in the dog dung to get your coin back, I think you get my point(and yes this would be an example of me rambling stfw). Welcome to primals world, I hope we have fun on this journey guess I gotta start getting more diligent about actually blogging in the future since I started this page, I mean there are days when I say a lot and then there are weeks where I won't post a damn thing.

Oh word of warning I do tend to make up words and add them to the lexicon of the english language, feel free to use the ones you like just remember to give me my due props I hate people passing off my verbage as their own like they're that brilliant, half the time it isn't even brilliance it's just what came to mind and it sounded good to me.

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