Before I bought my first stock, I had this impression of the stock market as a thrilling, exotic world of constant action. The image I had in my mind is a crowded trading floor with frantic traders shouting “BUY! BUY! BUY!” and “SELL! SELL! SELL!” desperately trying to drown each other out. For some reason,…
With the S&P 500 up over 140% in the past five years, it’s getting harder and harder to find stocks worth buying and holding for the long-term at current prices. The value investor in me loves to find great companies trading at a low P/E ratio, but those companies are few and far between as…
Over the past few years, I have made huge profit’s trading the Federal Reserve’s stress tests of the major US Banks. In the past, I have been a trader of Bank of America (BAC), Morgan Stanley (MS), Citigroup (C), and Fifth Third Bancorp (FITB). The Fed released the results of the test itself today, including…
Thirteen days ago, on March 5, I made a post about selling Linn Energy (LINE) at $32.00 for a small loss because of a technical breakdown I observed in the chart. The gist of my reasoning at the can be seen here in this chart of LINE I posted on March 5: As it…
A friend of mine recently traded World Wrestling Entertainment (ticker WWE) for a nice gain. The sad truth is that both of us are in our 30’s, and we are pro wrestling fans. The first step toward recovery is admitting you have a problem… Redneck hobbies aside, WWE has had a nice year, punctuated by…
I’ve made a lot of money buying and selling stocks based on their fundamentals. Fundamental stock analysis focuses on the performance of the company and the valuation of its stock based on your choice of hundreds of metrics for measuring value. P/E ratio is one of the simplest and most commonly-referenced fundamental analysis metrics. Many…
At the end of January, I took a small position in Capstead Mortgage Corp (ticker symbol CMO). Capstead is a mortgage Real Estate Investment Trust, or REIT. REITs are companies that own real estate that they typically profit from. Capstead has three major things going for it. First of all, with a P/E ratio of…
About three weeks ago I posted about Linn Energy (LINE), an oil and natural gas play that I was holding. Since I last wrote about Enerplus, the story hasn’t been so rosy with the company. Firstly, LINE reported very disappointing fourth quarter earnings. The stock dropped over 5% on the earnings report alone. To add…
I was planning on discussing some of my other stock holdings today, but RF Micro Devices (symbol RFMD) has been on such a roll lately that I feel like I should address it. I went into some detail about the merger between RF Micro Devices and TriQuint Semiconductor a couple of days ago, so I…
Today was not a good day for the stock market. At one point today, the Dow was down about 250 points before it bounced back a bit and closed down 153 for the day. On a day where the Dow was down about 1%, would I be upset if my portfolio was down about 1%…