Some Good News for My Portfolio Today

My post yesterday was very cathartic for releasing quite a bit of frustration. No matter what is troubling you, giving voice to it is always helpful. Most of the time, when you give voice to it you make it tangible. And unless you make a problem tangible it will gnaw on your sanity like a mouse on a wafer. As I said privately to an online friend, I thought not once, not twice but three times of yanking the post, but that would have been inauthentic to the purpose of my blog.

I've been patiently waiting for the REITS to break. I was early with some puts (kaputs!). I've elected to stalk my prey via the SRS. In case you are not familiar with the SRS it is the double inverse (short) of the IYR. Mind you, when you're early and the IYR goes up and up, your balance goes down and down. Here's a picture of it for the past 10 days.

For my loser round (2nd chance) on the Million Dollar Porfolio, I have all my money invested in Nighthawk Radiology (NHWK). Here's another picture.
Here's a 6 month picture

You can see the appeal for me. A wee bit beaten down, but clearly definable support. I purchased it for my less than $1M portfolio at $17.47. It appeared to be a broken stock, not a broken company. That is a useful distinction. Jim Cramer, though much can be said of him, has a sound bite or two that I find useful, this being one of them. Plus it is in the healthcare sector which is a good place to be. I also like the "comfort" of having bought it when the 5, 10, 20 day RSI (that's how I tag it on Metastock) were in the ditch. This method is similar to Bill's (Cara) but not exactly Bill's. I truly have had good results (high probability positive outcomes) using this method.

Here's another winner WZEN. Web Zen is from my China-immersion weekend. It was time well spent. I'm up 17%.



I bought CSIQ @10.51 and sold 5 days later at $12.10 (4/16/07) for a 19.6% gain. Not bad for the time. To provide some context for some of the coulda, woulda, shoulda laments, this is what CSIQ's chart currently looks like:


I would have lost money had I held, and I did not want to hold into earnings. You might, though, want to put CSIQ on a watch list.

I used to go back to positions I've entered and exited to do this sort of backward flogging. I don't do it anymore. Hindsight is 20/20 and prescience has no credible track record!

Last night I went to bed with several men (sadly there are few women authors on the subject, at least in this compendium) via my Behavioral Finance book. In fact, I was comforted by their embrace last night given that the paper that I was reading (I admit to skipping over the equations) stated that market participants are not necessarily rational. I think I promised sometime ago to post a thing or two from this book. I was just commenting to my husband that I needed another thing to delve into given that I dived into systemic risk and structured debt obligations which many of you were kind enough to delve into with me. So, I'll bring a thing or two from my Behavioral Finance readings into the blog. Russell will show me up, though, as he is so much better read than I am, but in doing so he will make important points.

I hope that you had a good day, and I appreciate your stopping in.