Investing

CMG is hitting an all-time high these days and after eating their tasty food, I can understand why. Good food at high prices is always a surefire way to make your stock a winner, until your fickle customers become cost conscience. My favorite dish is the chicken burrito bowl w/ sour cream and the red hot sauce. :) Update I posted about this stock back in May 2007 when it was trading at $82 or so and now, in 2019, it’s way higher. I love the food just as much now as I did back then. I’ve had my share of burrito bowls over the years! ...

I’ve posted this article before on my old site and thought it was fitting to re-post it here. It’s a story about a company called Tradebot Systems, Inc. CEO David Cummings, a former commodity pit trader and programmer, built an Automated Trading System, or Tradebot, which trades between 50 and 100 million shares a day! Wow! Tradebot trades 50 million to 100 million shares a day. Anywhere from 1 billion to 2 billion shares trade daily on Nasdaq. ...

Howard wants to buy put options on SMH. Me? I will wait and see which way she breaks from this narrow range, which started in mid 2005, before I do anything. Has it been trading in range for that long? My guess is that semiconductors aren’t the technology darlings they once were, maybe its because chips are more of a commodity now. Disclosure: Long INTC from years back. ...

Today I wanted to share with you a part of the algorithmic back end to my ETF Trend System. Note, I said “part”, I’m not giving away all my secrets. It’s written completely in Excel, incredibly simple, and is a macro that you can import. The system works by using something called linear regression slope. What’s that? The easiest way to understand what linear regression slope is, is to think back to your basic statistics class. Linear regression is the “best fit” line between a bunch of data points. A line is defined by the formula: y = mx+b, where y is your data point’s position on the y-axis, m is the slope, x is your data point’s position on the x-axis, and b is the slope intercept. What this ETF Trend following system does is place a “best fit” line across several price data points (8, 13, and 26 weeks) and then calculate the slope of the line. If the slope is positive, you have an upward trending ETF. Conversely, if the slope is negative then you have a downward tending slope. ...

I worked in my vegetable garden for most of the weekend and with every weed I plucked, the words “Ethanol” and “bio-fuel” kept popping in my head. I know that everywhere I turn, I see and hear about how Ethanol is going to save us from oil dependence and global warming. Despite my skepticism about Ethanol, I am curious to know what set of this new trend in the Agriculture index? Exactly what happened at the end of 2001? Was it demand from China? Or a sudden fascination with Cocoa? Inquiring minds want to know! ...

I’ve been following the China iShares, FXI, for a long time now and I noticed that Maoxian posted about it nearing its all time high. This reminded me of the time when the talk was that FXI might be overextended or possibly reaching a top. At the time, it sure looked that way. I even posted on my old site saying that the trend might be over but the more I thought about it, the more I wondered if my initial call was wrong. ...

Several years ago, when I was living in New Mexico, I had a girlfriend who used read very esoteric books about cutting edge theories on biology, evolution, and astronomy. We were talking about “what-if” scenarios one day and the conversation drifted to some called “punctuated equilibrium.” It was explained to me, at the time, that species evolve slowly in an environment that’s in equilibrium. A sudden leap in a species evolutionary development happens when a catastrophic internal or external event occurs. The example she used was the asteroid wiping out the dinosaurs theory. The dinosaurs lived and evolved in a relatively state of equilibrium until an asteroid killed them suddenly and allowed mammals to evolve rapidly. ...

In my old blog, Digital Breakfast, I posted a few times about my desire to build an Automated Trading System (ATS) using Excel. I figured I’d build it in Excel since I know that software the best and conveniently enough, Interactive Brokers offers an API for Excel. Today, I located my old real time ETF Trend Signal system, which is based on statistical performance measures to generate trend signals, and decided to begin additional back end development on it. ...

There’s something to be said about buying winners. Winners continue to win, and in the case of stocks, they keep making new highs. I know that AAPL is a favorite holding of Howard and his hedge fund’s strategy of finding and investing select stocks making new 52 week all time highs is a smart. The trick is to buy the right company making the high. It’s safe to say that Apple is the right company, its emerged as an innovative powerhouse once again. Steve Jobs and company sure have been busy, first the iPod (and iTunes), a new generation of desktop computers running on Intel chips, and now the iPhone (out soon). People are loving it and buying like crazy. APPL made another 52 week high yesterday. ...

Sometimes trends have intra-trend reversals (which are great selling or buying opportunities) and then quickly resume their trends. Motorola tried to break free from their down trend, and almost succeeded with the introduction of their wildly popular Razr phone (I have one). With no new innovative product followup, MOT resumed its downward trend. Update Just over 12 years ago I posted about how [Motorola (MOT) was in a downtrend because it couldn’t come up with a new breakthrough product. The Razr phone was a wildly popular for years but MOT just rode it’s coat tails. Traders and investors punished the stock for it’s lack of vision. ...