I had promised that I was going to start my own thread regarding stock investments and the markets. So many things have happened since last time I was here and I really do not feel like sharing my knowledge. But a promise is a promise and there have been few people that have emailed me and supported me.

This thread will deal with investing in the stock markets. I will not discuss individual stocks but discuss ETFs like SPY, DIA, IWM and QQQQ. The one good thing about trading ETFs compared to individual stocks is the the ETFs provide instant diversification among similar companies within the same sector.

I will post more as we go along, regarding entry-price, profit-target and stop-losses. I do not think that any ETF is good or bad. It is good only if I'm making money and bad if I'm losig money.

If you have not been in the market so far, please read this as an information piece only rather than my recommendations. There is risk involved and you should know how much risk to take on any position.

Any suggestations, comments and criticisms are welcome as long as it is market related. If this thread gets out of hand and we start discussing off-topics, I'll stop posting.

Have a happy new year!!!! May 2007 bring you and your family lots of joys and riches.

Yes, TT, I mean people that get drunk every weekend and/or smoke. It is fun to drink every once in a while but I don't get it when people drink every weekend or smoke. I have no respect for people that don't take care of their bodies, and it includes not working out too.

I am going to the meeting tomorrow and I'll post some pictures sometimes next week.

Emini,

looks like you have quite a big shoulders around to rub with. Kool!.. I bet you must be busy talking strategies and stuff with the new meets.

Also, on smoking and drinking part, I gather, you are more of a disciplinarian person. I promised my wifey that I will quit ciggie b4 the season starts which is tomorow. I still have few ciggies on me for now, but I think I am well and over it. On drinking; it has been the biggest nuance to the whole Nepalese society. We tend to drink and boast about ourself for no good reason. I for one believe that that gotta change, like you said, if we were to move forward. Thus, I also am looking at an option to turn into social drinker. Tuff task at hand, but I know, I will get there.

I work out 5 days a week. Both Cardio and weights. The body fat runs 9 percent for me, although, I have heard that hockey players run at optimal 3-4 percent. Wow!

TT, looks like you are ready for some week-end fun. Are you in Toronto? Or somewhere else. Please share if you will.

Ani, Emini, yes I am 10 minutes away from the happening place of this nation. Give me some notice when you are coming, so that I can plan my calendar.

Happy week-end to you all.

Best~!

-B

lol Bri, how'd you know I'm in Canada? As far as my location is concerned, I might just email you.

Wink!

Wow, nice to see some health conscious people here. I work out too but the school's too far and the gym membership is too expensive. :p so i just do some old school stuff at home.

And as far as drinking and smoking is concerned, I have never tried either. :D. I don't know what either tastes like. So yeah, i'm pretty disciplined and in terms of academics i''m a contrarian and 90% of education has come from self study. i goto school and classes but I just doze off. lmao!

Anneee wayz, have a good weekend all!!! I might go running by the riverside today in downtown.

Peace!!!!

INTERESTING
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

www.zecco.com

$0 commisons on trading if you make less than 40 trades a month of less than 10 trades a day. $3.50 after that!!!!

For a non-frequent trader, even someone like me, this should be great. Here's why:

SOME HIGHLIGHTS:
****************
Founders: former Merrill Lynch and other Top notch Investment Banking Frims' VPs and execs.

Partners: Penson Worldwide- the same clearing firm that I currently go through with my broker. They're really good and although they're the 6th largest in the US, they do have a lot of benefits such as a large stock inventory (usually my gauge of how deep their pockets are) and are the clearing firm for many many brokerage houses.

Trading Platform: Nexa Technologies- Once again, I use their platform and so do numerous other brokerages. Examples? E-Trade Canada, Questtrade, Tradefreedom etc..

Their trading platforms are excellent. The online versions are good too.

One downside I'm assuming would be the overall layout as a web based trading platform without all the fancy stuff I'm used to wouldnt be as "easy" to use once you're used to a desktop software.

Browser limitations and settings might be another problem. Pop ups may need to be enabled, etc. Otherwise this is worth looking at. I'm still critical about $0.00 fees since I'm worried about execution speed as stop losses are hard manage in a fast moving market without a good execution gurantee.

Check it out!!

**********************************************************************

That's all. Just came back from my run. Running by the river is good for your health I think. A runner's high is good for a good confidence boost required to make good trading decisions..:P
Phew, it was hard, been over two months since I ran cuz of exams and stuff. Had to rest every 5-10 minutes!!! ARRGHHH

Enjoy the weekend!!!!

20000 shareholders attended BH meeting in Omaha

- http://biz.yahoo.com/weekend/ritespring_1.html

Hey Everyone: Due to some personal reasons I won't be updating this thread any more. It has been a pleasant ride while it lasted. Don't worry the personal reasons are good. I will start another thread and post my long-term stock selection criteria that I had promised and have successfully backtested. It will be upto you guys to update it. I hope that you'll keep the discussion going.

Here is another good read.

http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/letters.html

No problem Emini. You've been great- very insightul ideas and discussions! Over 7000 views and over 400 posts-this is one of the most widely viewed and used threads. I'll be a regular here and the more I learn, the more I'll post.

Here's a good blog you might wanna include as an RSS feed into your browser people!

http://www.pfblog.com/

And I'm waiting eagerly for your new post.

good luck with everything in your life!!!!

Good Bye on this thread Emini ji.

Welcome in advance in another one as you promised.

YOU have been a treasure trove of experience for me, and I shall continue to hold you in the highest esteem.

Ani as TT said, wish you the very selected best in whatever you want to achieve. Let me know if you ever need a good friend to talk and discuss anything under the sun, that you deem wokkay.

I should not lie, but I feel sad. My wifey is like hey what happened to ya. *smile*

Best~!

-B

ps off to spiderman 3. Well, TT we gotta hold our horses on this thread now. I gotta pull up my socks and start contributing. Will do, I promise.

Bri, just sent you an email.

Read it.

Also, I want to do a bit of quantitative research over the summer if I have the time and resources. The idea is still vague but it has to do with the return of the S&P 500 or some "hypothetically" named index that contains the various stocks from 1960 till present and see how the returns would have varied had other stocks been selected in random for such an Index.

So I'll be using something called "Monte Carlo" simulation. I would need access to a database of stocks with the following:

1. A database of midcap and large cap stocks since 1960.Midcap because I want to make it more generalized. S&P 500 is all large cap)
2. A database that has their daily open and closing values.
3. Also, the ability to alocate them into various sectors and industries.

Factors to be considered:

-The S&P 500 initially had market value weighting. So till 2005 i'll need to use that method but after that, i'll need to use the "shares available for trading" method for those companies.

-I'm pretty sure the market value weighting would not be much of a problem but having access to the "shares available for trading" criteria might be difficult since there may only exist a database that contains such figure for the current S&P 500 stocks. For others that weren't included, it may not exist.

- I will also need to randomly throw discard a few stocks at a time to add NEWER stocks and hold them for a specified period of time, all done randomly.

If anybody has attempted this kind of simulation, please let me know. also, if there's a quantiatively trained person here, especially in mathematics with knowledge of coding in MATLAB, that would be awesome!!!

This s tougher than it even seems. For a simulation run at least a 1,000,000 times, it would probably eat up my computer for 2-5 days since there will be over a 1,000,000 different returns computer for each trial of randomly selected stocks and their returns till present.

HELP me out. I don;t think I can do this on my own.:D:D

the reason I want to do it is because I wanna see whether there would be ay significant difference between randomly choosing stocks and doing a thorough analysis. Now I respect such research, i truly do. But I want to do this for purely quantitative reasons and for fun.

Have a good evening!!!!!

Bri & TT: I wish you all the best. You guys have been awesome here and were able to understand what I did and why I was doing so. Please feel free to email me.

Bri: I might still be in DC sometimes in June. I will let you know. I will be staying in a hotel so you won't have to make room for me but I would love to come to your place for daal, bhat and aloo ko achar.

TT,
thanks for your email. Also, many a thanks for the free-offer to be a friend. And I assure you that you have one in me. I shall write back to your email on week days this.

Emini,
read the letter from the Guru. He just amazes me with this simplicity. Most of the times you read these annual letters, you get no sense of what you are reading, except for numbers and yada yada yada...But the Guru, has lots of love and compassion built into his business ethics, and that is where lies his essence of success.

So today being the season start for me, I am puffing away few last remaining sticks. I am still soul-searching how to deal with the lack of nicotine fix on the anvil. I shall update you on it as it comes along.

Yesterday, in Spiderman3 movie, Mcguire puts it very subtly. We all have choices. We all are product of our choices. YES! very truly so.

back to TT:
can you be more elaborate on the Matlab requirements you have. I am thinking about exploring of hooking you up with couple of guys. But then, I want them to be equally up to it. So let me know if you think we sud proceed in that direction.

back to Emini:
correct me please, I assume, the move has got something to do with signing some papers that says Non-compete. Or may be I am wrong.

aa Dal-bhat ani khasi ko masu is promised. Tara, my wifey is better at cooking aviyal, putta, and fish. Also, I am a good cook, so you can rely on the back-up option. hahaha... but then momo or choyala is also there for you, if you are a non-veg like me. I am looking forward to the meet.

To all:
I am playing first big game of the season. Against my last year's club. I made a move coz I could not agree with the leadership. I guess that is how true leaders are. Yes, I scored two centuries and quite a bit of winning knocks here and there. But today I shall hold my Tendulkar-sent bat against them. wish me luck! Also, with the ciggie. ahahahah

Thanks a lot Emini it's been a real pleasure. It's just motivating to se there are other Nepalis very successful in this field. Regardless of caste, religion we've discussed topics we love and that's the start of a successful entrepreneurial Nepali community in the West.

Bri:

I'm not an advanced user of Matlab- just got started but I can always practice for a few weeks and get really good as I do have some coding experience with it- especially with monte carlo simulations.

Like I said, I'll need time to do that kind of research and I'm still not sure if I'm able to do it. But let your friends know- it should be a good research topic for them if they are in academia. Any form of research should be less motivated by personal gratification and more by the satisfaction of the masses. Also, coming up with a database first would be the most difficult task- generating random numbers is a piece of cake.

P.S. you have a cricket club there? Dang!!!!
If there is a religion I truly follow it's cricket and Brian Lara is my god. I'e failed quizzes and done crappy on mid terms and finals because of my dedication. I used to be a fast bowler back in Nepal during our high school years- they called me Curtly.:P

Anyways, good luck Bri!!! KILL THEM!!!!

Action begins in 17 hours again for next week.

The S&P 500 has been making steady highs with the occasional pullbacks that are totally normal. The QQQQ has been in excellent strength and we are, at least in the intermediate term, in a bullish trend. For those still discussing the recent correction a couple of months go, well, pull up a 5 year chart and it'll show up as a blip. We go where the trend goes.

I am not predicting where the market will go, and anybody who claims to do so is either
1. Extremely lucky and bound to get his ass burnt
2. Foolish

Although I'm quantitatively trained, I don't waste my time on time series forecasting and running monte carlo simulations to create a "sum over histories" scenario. I do like to think about such things just for the sake of fun, that's all.

Here's an amazing read: Nicholas Darvas available online:
http://www.nicolasdarvas.org/

enter in a bulls#it nameand email and youll be send to the page with the actual texts from the book. copy and paste all of the pages and read em in word or whatever you use.

That's all.

Time out from TT!!

A few intermediate term picks:

EMC: buy above 16.00, target should be about 25.
ALKS: buy above 17:00, target should be 20
URZ: I'f I'm right, this baby is going to double in a year.


Fundamentals on ALKS:
Rising EPS, Outperforming sector on various fronts, including an "effective management". I dont really tend to look at that last one.
Has been on a consistent growth for the past 2-3 years and being a biotech has all the juices to keep it flowing.

TT,

good morning to ya. Well, why EMC? Do you think it is slated for merger or do you think that digital storage will have significant market potential in the very near future? Fill me in please?

ALKS has a good prospect, but again, stem cell? Let us hope that Feds wokkay some leverage for stem cells sector to make some important break through at least on the remedy side of science if not on preventive side.

Had a bad week-end. Got out on a golden duck, 2nd ball of the innings. Did not I say to myself that I am not going across the line early on? Well, did get in the middle of the bat, but should have kept the ball up than down. Which team did you play for back home?

cheers!

-B

Hey Bri,

think of it this way. Digital storage is much more efficient that traditional forms of storage. We've come a long way from casette taps.

Here's a passage from Reuters:

". EMC Centera CAS systems provide online access to archived fixed content, data that cannot be modified or will not change over time, such as digital x-ray images, movies, check images, medical records, email correspondence and other similar types of digital objects. Centera systems help customers worldwide comply with complex governance and regulatory requirements for digital record retention, archiving and access.
"

On top of that, it has been making acquisitions after aquisitions- expanding its consumer base and its line of business. And since early this decade, look how far this stock has come down. It's trading at multi- year highs.

So I say, above 16.00, this is a buy and hold.

As far as ALKS, any biotech that actually makes some money raises my eyebrow.

"The Company has two commercial products. RISPERDAL CONSTA (risperidone), long-acting injection, is a long-acting atypical antipsychotic medication for use in schizophrenia and is marketed worldwide by Janssen-Cilag (Janssen), a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson."

also
"VIVITROL, the first and only once-monthly injectable medication for alcohol dependence, is indicated for the treatment of alcohol dependence in patients who are able to abstain from drinking in an outpatient setting and are not actively drinking prior to treatment initiation. "
It is also involved in diabetes research. Biotechs are hype, jump in on the hype.
Like I said, follow where the market goes. Being a contrarian helps in times of extreme exhuberance but why miss the boat?
This is a risky company, but I think above 17.00, this should be a buy till say 20.00. But then again, one will have to use their judgement. I'm not even lookin at it below 17.00.

And as far as cricket is concerned, I just had a small team with my friends, thats all. We were too young to go out and have an all out cricket team- considring we wrote SLC during the emergency phase lots of tensions.

But I'm sad to hear about your dismissal yesterday- happens sometimes. I was primarily a bowler- more like an allrounder too.
And to add to my luck, I somehow discovered how to swing the ball and all of a sudden I was all hot. But couldnt play for long.

Anyways, good luck trading/ investing everyone.

The picture:
Good wholesome uptrend across all the major indices- the DOW, the NASDAQ and the S&P 500. Canadians (TSX) are up too.
The volume on all are solid and I am officially bullish for the moment.

Sorry, I'm revising my view on ALKS.It should be a buy above 18.00. I wouldnt buy a lot right away at that price. I'd use only a fraction of thr dollar amount I usually use per trade. Once it catches momentum, I'd add to my position and keep a trailing stop, somewhere in the 20-25 cent range.

And not surprisingly, guess what comes up on the scan?

INTC:

Price target 25.00, buy above 22.50. Add to position after 23.00.

for the more conservative, buy above 23.00. This one has potential to go high.

Like emini says, do you own DD before u buy anything.

Hello boys and gals,
Here's some more stks that popped into my scanner: Once again, please do not mistake this as a solicitation, merely something to place in your watchlist.
COCO
TUES
WERN
UBET
TTI
KPA

Enjoy!

Those are great picks jhyalincha.

Yeah, I'd definitely wait till I see some more buying interest in some of those.