Who trims hedge funds?
How come no-one ever launches a shrubbery fund?
If you wanted instant water – what would you add to it?
Do mimes make good pit traders? How many bushels of wheat would “palms pressed against the window” get you?
If buying a stock for cash is a “trade”, is watching your option expire worthless a [...]
Entries from August 2008
August 29, 2008
Things SOMEONE has to think about …
August 29, 2008
Portfolio results August 2008; up 4.5%
No I’m not dead, but thanks for asking.
Up until 21 August, everything was jamming along - and then it all stopped, and I haven’t posted since. With 12 REAP trades in August already, it looked like we were tracking to easily trounce July’s record 13 trades, but then we hit the doldrums – 6 trading days in a [...]
August 21, 2008
TU#63 21Aug08 – ridin’ the grain train
TRADING UPDATE
A few days ago we had bumper crops all around – sell, sell, sell! And today, ohmyGod they’re all going to freeze because they were planted too late! – buy, buy buy! Such is the nature of financial news and reports that yank everyone’s chain on a day to day basis. But, for our [...]
August 20, 2008
TU#62 20AUG08 – Gaming, gold, and … ginseng
TRADING UPDATE
Today, as tropical storm Fay wobbles back and forth across Florida (as did the market over yesterday’s closing price), we had a fairly routine REAP trade – and, a portfolio substitution.
Yesterday as gold rallied, the HBP Global Gold Shares Bear+ Fund (HGD) dropped while Nvidia (NVDA) was moving higher on the strength of its positive earnings report [...]
August 15, 2008
TU#61 15Aug08 – Trina Solar, the hare wakes up
If this were a race between the tortoise and the hare (with a large peleton in between), then our hare Trina Solar (TSL) just woke up. Trina had gone to sleep for while after creating a comfortable 3-trade lead over 2nd place Horizons BetaPro Global Gold Shares Bear+ ETF (HGD) on 17 July. But HGD [...]
August 13, 2008
TU#60 13Aug08 – Commodities gaining a foothold?
We had a bit of a rally in both gold and oil today, and a powerful one in grains. Natural gas ended more uncertainly, but its short ETF inexplicably overshot to the upside this morning to pair up with the financials ETF in Group #1. This was a nice little trade because it cleaned out even more of [...]
August 11, 2008
TU#59 11Aug08 – commodities pulling G’s
Not one day goes by and we have the new long oil (TSX:HOU) and long gold bullion (TSX:HBU) ETFs blasting out of the starting gate with a trade! Since I first bought them many months ago, the iShares Asia ex-Japan ETF (AMEX:EPP) and IGM Financial (TSX:IGM) have never traded.
Today’s action is courtesy of a whopping $33 intra-day [...]
August 9, 2008
30,000 visits, winning in 2008, and the next level
Today the hit counter clicked over 30,000, so somebody keeps visiting. I’ve noticed that on weekends the visits drop off, then pick up during the weekdays. So it looks like we’ve settled in to a rythm where some investing regulars keep checking in when the markets are open, and then opt to have lives on the weekends. Thanks [...]
August 6, 2008
TU#58 06AUG08 – trading on the grain drain, and global dimming
To introduce this post, I was going to try to come up with a clever Pygmalion play on words along the lines of “the grain in Spain falls mainly in the plain”, but it didn’t really work, so we’ll talk about the grain drain (of long equity) instead (and then global dimming).
Yesterday I said that I expected [...]
August 5, 2008
TU#57 5Aug08 – back to the future(s)
Yesterday was a holiday in Canada, so none of my commodity ETFs could trade. Oil and gold took a big hits, natural gas absolutely puked up 8% or so of its value, and soybeans were limit down. Much of this “correcting” carried though overnight, so at 9:30 there were whopping pent-up gains on the whole short complex, [...]
