Play Doh

Here's a YTD performance of one of my accounts. It's an old employer account they used to manage stock options, employee stock purchases. I started with about a $5,500 remainder balance in this account about a year and a half ago. Rather than close it out upon my leaving, I elected to keep it open and consider it purely speculative money. It has been fully invested all of this time. My current positions are RTK, WGDF and WZEN. As you can see the account performance has been rather heart stopping good and bad. It now is valued at $14,600.

Given that it was such a small amount of money there were only just two options: (1) have one holding; (2) buy lots of shares of <$10 securities. I've employed both. Now I don't show you this to brag or make any claim to genius or special knowledge. But rather to introduce the concept of speculative money. No fear money. Money that you can lose. And have the discipline that if you lose it, you give yourself a mandatory time out before having a speculative carve out. Whatever the amount you choose, it should be an amount that you are prepared to lose. And if you lose it, give yourself a moratorium on having any more speculative money at risk. Remember, I'm not recommending anything here. No one could be less qualified to make any recommendations than I. But this is a real account, with real money and real performance. And, don't think for a moment that when the account dropped in March that it didn't give me some pause. Here's the account detail:
RTK is a coal to liquids company. I'll tell you that I bought it completely wrong.
WGDF I picked up from Bill Cara's website (after doing DD). It sat and sat for some time and then broke out. Here's the chart.

WZEN is a stock that I found on my own. I've had it on a watch list. Here's the chart. As you can see it has gotten jiggy over the last three days. I was watching the saw tooth pattern carefully as support was holding. Had it broken, I would have sold.



Anyway, I wanted to give you a little voyeurism for the speculative portion of my portfolio. I'll give periodic updates--even if it turns ugly--as there will heuristic value in that. Each of these holdings could turn ugly fast.

Have a great 4th of July. I'll likely not be posting much.