Sunday, March 28, 2010

Long time no trade



So dear readers,

I was pretty lazy over the past two weeks due to two reasons:
First, I just started a new job, which basically took away all of my time and second, well almost nothing happened.

So what did happen?
As you see my portfolio has decreased and I am currently in the red zone.
How come? Well for one thing, I have sold my Fiat stocks (it was more of an automatic limit sell, but well whatever) and made some 100 Bucks or so and as you can see I have something in my portfolio that has no value.
What's that? These are options on new stock. DIC Asset AG decided that it would be kinda cool to issue more stocks. Firms do this either because they need money, or like in this case, because they think in the near future the time is right to purchase a couple of objects and therefore put money aside.
So what happens when a company issues new stocks? First of all, the stock price falls dramatically, because now there are more shares and this means that all money that is earned has to be split among more shareholders. In a nutshell: your piece of the cake gets smaller.
But there is a certain law that provides shareholders from being ripped off:
If new shares are issued only the old shareholders have the right to buy them. Often enough new stocks are issued well below the current market price, and so you can either buy the stocks or you can sell your right to buy new stocks to someone who wants to.
As I do not want to reinvest in that company, I will choose to sell my right tomorrow hence generating an instant cash flow of something between 40 and 60 €.

In the end this means that I am not really losing money, although the picture above tells something else ;)

Keep reading cause these days could be somewhat exciting in terms of stock trading!

Thursday, March 11, 2010

Update Update!



So folks,
yesterday was kind of a big day for my whole portfolio.

1. I sold Solarworld after the stock rocketed upwards to 11€, leaving me with 3% profit (the day before I had a 5% loss - lucky me ! )

2. I bought BASF (Goldman Sachs Conviction - you know you want it!) and DIC Asset AG, which is a real estate company mainly for office buildings. I always wanted to invest in real estate and that company seemed great. Well, doesn't pay out yet (see the table above), but after I saw Solarworld rise and fall (or in that case rather fall and rise) I believe in every stock.

3. As you can see, my Fiat stocks did a pretty good job for the whole portfolio performance.
After all, this leaves me with 2% overall performance, which for the time being is terrific, really.


I got some money left, and I'm thinking about hedging my portfolio with some short option. The DAX looks pretty overbought as a whole, but it's not that clear. Hmm...
Stay tuned !

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose




I did it again.
It's like, when you want to quit smoking. You remember all bad things about it and tell yourself, it's one of stupidiest things you've ever done. And then you do it again. Maybe not immediately, but at some point you always do it again. Afterwards you feel miserable, and tell yourself that now you really quit.
I've been having the same hard feelings with tech stocks. You have know, that when I was 11 I put my whole money (confirmation money, mostly) in a tech fund. A year or so later, the Internet-Tech bubble burst, and I lost a fortune.
At that point I swore myself never to buy tech stocks again - and now? Damn, yesterday I bought Solarworld. I'm almost crying right now, because it was one of the worst decisions I made - ever!
At this point (a day later) I already lost 5%, which would be most of the profit the peugeot trade made. Life's tough. Trading, too.
I wouldn't recommend buying that shitty Solarworld stock. I don't know, why I did it, honestly. I was influenced or under the influence or something like that.

However, I did make a trade which is maybe worthwhile - bought myself a share in Fiat (for some reasons I dig car manufacturers now).
Why? Easy - Goldman Sucks said "Conviction Buy" so I bought. Although most Analysts don't know a thing about stocks (read City Boy and you'll understand) these guys really know when to buy. Every time a Goldman says buy, you better buy - trust me they know game.

That's it for today - I will retreat now and cry about the stupidity of the Solarworld trade.
Never ever am I buying stupid tech stocks again...

Thursday, March 4, 2010

Bye Bye Peugeot

By now I have sold Peugeot again. With more than 7% return in 3 days I thought it's better to secure what I got so far.
And here comes a very important fact about trading: It's almost impossible to buy at the cheapest possible price and sell at the highest. Trust me - been there, done that (or rather tried that).
As I follow how the stock went I see that I could have sold it for even more than I got, but hey that's trading. As long as you go out with a profit, you've done everything right.
Besides 7% in 3 days? Put that in your pipe and smoke it, dear fund managers!

However, this does leave me with another problem: Where to invest now!?
Hmm...

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

what happened?



My mad man portfolio selection turns out to work so far.
Since yesterday I could make a profit of 3,85 %.
This may not seem much, but most people get less return p.a. (per annum - per year)
on their investments.
I don't want to praise myself too much, because maybe by tomorrow it's all worthless again.
Still, if anyone had been following my investment advice (which I assume nobody really did)
he or she would be 3,85% richer, which in my case equals about 40€ (not bad for a day).
But what really bothers me is that I couldn't come up with any other investment idea, because I can't decide whether the market is generally going up or down...uff. Ideas, anyone?
It really kills me that I have more money lying on the bank account than in stocks - damn.
I'm thinking about investing in Cheesecake factory, because Penny, the main character of "the big bang theory" works there - can't be any bad, can it?

See you tomorrow guys!

Tuesday, March 2, 2010

My Portfolio




So guys,
I had some trouble writing posts lately because I was pretty stressed out by exams and shit. However, now I have a bunch of time and will continue this how it was meant.
Today I'm starting with my own portfolio (portfolio in this context: selection of financial assets, such as stocks, in which you have invested money).
Or well, I'm not starting it, I'm rather exposing it to you, so you can follow my investments, pick up some and comment on them.

OK, let's start here:
Today, as you see I bought stocks of the well known french car manufacturer Peugeot.
Why that? Partly because I myself drive a 10-years-old 206 and partly because I just had this feeling while observing the stock, that a price below 20€ is just too low.
Stating this is very risky, I know, because you always have to see why the stock price changed. However, the market is not perfect and over the past months and years I started observing that some stocks have a kind of strike price:
If they fall below that, they will always go up again. A pretty good example of this would be the Apple stock of the past month. The moment it got under 200$ it always went up again - crazy huh?
This is, as you see, no in depth analysis, but sometimes you just have to follow a feeling, especially in stocks.

It's kinda lame, that I only have one stock in portfolio. Actually, there were two in there, namely a bunch of Telefonica stocks but these have been automatically sold due to a limition. Honestly, I liked my Telefonica stocks, and I think I will rebuy them if they fall a little.

That's it for today, stay tuned for major changes in my portfolio during the next few days/weeks, since I have cash lying around on the bank account and can't leave the house due to an operation I had (damn you wisdom teeth!).