Tuesday, January 18, 2005

 

Yawn

My portfolio has gone into a state of hibernation. It managed to eke out a $1,200 gain today thanks to decent moves by ASIA and GTSI, but that's less than I would have made if my money had been in a broad index like SPY or QQQQ.

In other news, I sold my shares in ZCOM at the open (at $2.30 per share) after the company announced quarterly numbers that were worse than I expected. I don't typically dump a stock just because of one bad quarter, but the problems here seem more entrenched and I suspect it will be some time before they regain profitability. For the time being, I'd rather be on the sidelines.

I also added a new stock to my team: Goldfield. Don't let the name fool you: They are not engaged in gold production. It's a nice value stock with a market cap of $15 million and $30 million in annual sales, trading at 75 percent of book value, and generated cash from operations of $4 million last year. Good enough for me; I picked up 15,000 shares this morning at 57 cents per share.

Comments:
What do you think about ASIA? It's been up 10+% since last month. Would you sell at this point and take the profit or leave it there?

I am up $540 on it and wondering if I should be selling at this point or keep it and see if it goes further. My worry is that it might go down and part of me is thinking I should sell now and if it goes down, I can buy it again. Versus it going down and having the money sit there waiting it for it go back up.

As you can see, I really do not have that much info on this stock. I just bought it because it seemed reasonable and looked like it would move up a bit.

I just started investing last November, so still learning. Seems like my biggest problem so far is selling too fast. I sell about 2-3 weeks after I buy at a slight gain. I havent sold many losers at this point... keeping them and see. Most of my losers are not 10% loss yet (except for AMD), so still hopeful on them.

Scott
 
I'd wait a bit more with Asia. I think it still has room to run.
 
The entire goal of investing is to beat the S&P 500 which stockcoach is currently destroying! Keep in mind that frequent trading eats into your portfolio with taxes and commissions. Holding a gain longer than one year results in a mere 15% capital gains tax versus your respective bracket. However, if you really dont like a company's prospects its almost always better to dump than to hold on for that tax gain. IMHO
 
I am wondering which stock screener you use. When I use Yahoo's to show all stock with market cap less than 10Millions it only shows 5 companies.
 
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