Thursday, October 18, 2007

The Blow Up Artist

In case you missed it, here's a great article about Victor Niederhoffer from The New Yorker, one of my favorite magazines.

Mareva, "On roule a 160"

This video meshes like 3 of my childhood fantasies into one event... slot cars, saucy, "dominating" women with short skirts, and metal necklaces. Don't ask.



(h/t bloggerdotcom)

An Easy Day

I really chilled out today. It was easy because my first trade of the day was also my best. All the damn banks gapped down again... any stock that had to deal with mortgages or anything like that gapped down.

All except one. RWT.



Somehow, this idiot managed to gap up close to a point. He even had a giganto bid hanging out at $30.50. If you had balls, you could have gotten short thousands of shares. It's the most liquidity I've seen displayed at one price since the inception of the hybrid market.

Unfortunately, I only got short 400 shares. But still, I made close to 2 points on some of those shares.

After that, I had similar trades in ANW and PMI. Similar in that I caught decent moves in the stocks with only small share size. It's too bad that I tend to catch bigger moves when I'm trading with smaller size. I'm sure there's some psychological lesson to be gleaned from that information, but I'm not digging it out today.

Anyway, that was it. My day was done. The only other thing I did was churn small positions in FED making him my worst stock of the day. Seriously, look at that graph... it would have been stupid to lose $20 in that stock today... much worse to lose over $200.



Look, because this post is short why don't you take the extra time I'm "giving" you to email your entire address book and tell them to read this damn blog. I write about licorice, stocks, surfing, the media... I mean seriously there's something for everyone.

Go "favorite" it or vote for it somewhere... I dunno.

Anyway, here's the stats:

P&L, $933
Best, RWT, $512
Worst, FED, -$269
17,200 shares traded.
11 stocks traded. 8 winners, 3 losers.
97 trades

Virtual Office, $6663. Dow, -3.58, 13,888.96.

Momojuicing, $3432 on 8400 shares traded.
Misstrade, $1675 on 9400 shares traded.
Me, $933 on 17,200 shares traded.
Akalawoo, $340 on 10 contracts traded.
OBAT, $187 on 9400 shares traded.
Bubs, $156 on 400 shares traded.
Tapeworm, $95 on 2 contracts traded.
Denarii, -$47 on 5800 shares traded.
Evolution, -$108 on 50,600 shares traded.

Sigh... volume between 1.2 and 1.3 billion again.

Anyway, Momo gets a new floor and he starts posting fancy numbers. Go figure.

It was a pretty good day for the VO considering that the market threatened to put anyone who took a glance at it to sleep today. Bad sentence, eh? But really, it felt dead to me today... that is, unless you were trading the shippers again. What a sector!

GOOG reported and spiked 20 points in either direction. I wonder what that does to Akalawoo's "strangle?"

Gotta go. I have a date with a Kookaburra bag.

P.S. Vote on the poll or lose your "privileges."

Licorice

I'm not like, a big eater of licorice or anything. I find it odd that I'm even writing a post with the title "licorice."

It all started last week when I was playing Candyland with my daughter. I landed on a "licorice spot" and lost my turn. It got me thinking about licorice and how I hadn't had any in awhile.

I mentioned this to Judy and the next day, she surprised me with a bag of Kookaburra Licorice.



Licorice. Licorice. Licorice.

It's a weird word, no?

Anyway, the licorice was great and I finished the entire bag in short order.

Okay, so fast forward to yesterday. Yesterday sucked. I didn't get up from my desk all day... I didn't stretch... I overtraded... and, if you recall from my daily post, I had my mother-in-law in my office watching Mary Poppins while my daughter ripped small pieces of paper into smaller pieces of paper while chanting the word "NO."

So after dinner I said to Judy, "You know, I'm in a bad mood. Let's go into town and get some of that licorice, that'll cheer me up." So, we packed our daughter into the car and drove into town. We were too late. The stores had closed. However, undeterred in my quest for licorice, I stopped at a 7-11 and picked up some Twizzlers. "Whatever, licorice is licorice," I thought.

Wrong. WRONG. In short, Twizzlers are shit.

Look, do yourself a favor and try some of this Kookaburra Licorice. I'm not kidding, I just bought 16 pounds of the stuff from their online store. It sounds crazy, I know. And to be honest, I feel a little nervous about it but when it arrives I know I'll be very happy with my purchase.

I told Judy. All she said was, "You know, some things are left better in small quantities. You're going to get sick of it... 16 pounds? No..."

"Sweet," I said. "They sell it in bulk for a reason."

Radiohead, "Videotape" (remixed by SKEW)

Already the remixes are coming out... great song. Love this remix too.

Vaccines

Off topic I know, but I saw this article on Yahoo.

Seriously, I had chicken pox when I was a kid, I enjoyed it. I played all day and ate ice cream.

Why should it be MANDATORY that my daughter receives this vaccination? Who the fuck dies from chicken pox? If I have to lie about my religion to empower myself to make decisions for my own family, well, then that's just a consequence of silly laws.

No vaccine should be mandatory unless it's for a disease that's killing people. If that makes me ignorant, so be it.

Thursday Stock Earnings

Again, no stocks that I love to trade.

You've all heard about the big BK miss... BAC miss... there are other banks out there reporting today as well. WM, BBT, CBH, PNC and STI.

I'll also be watching SPWR pretty closely. That solar sector has been acting like a flaming ball of death to the shorts.

Finally, just for movement, I'll check out CTXS, ILMN, SYK and PH.

Could be a fun day. Especially if FXI goes to $0. DIE!! FXI! DIE!!

DSL: Short Squeezes Don't Always Work



With over 40% of it's float short, I figured someone would be covering with all the bad news that has hit. Nope! And it's downgraded again today.

FXI: Price Target $37.64

But I'll take $190 too.



UPDATE: I covered 100 shares of my 150 share short position at an average price of $206.25. Meanwhile, the stock is still halted on the NYSE for whatever reason...