Investing

Boy oh boy the real estate market is back with a vengeance. All of my Architect and Engineering friends are busier than right before the 2007 meltdown. Building additions, knockdowns, and the like are flooding in. It seems that everyone just woke up this year and got busy. Flippers are back And the Flippers are back… My real estate investing friends (aka Flippers) are snapping up house at County Court Houses for pennies on the dollar, cleaning and fixing them, then flipping back onto the market. My Realtor friends are busy as well too, new showings and new sales. Everyone seems to be happy and whispers of “the good times” are back again. ...

**Disclosure:** Some of the links below are affiliate links and at no additional cost to you, I’ll earn a commission. When you purchase a product or service using one of my affiliate links, the company compensates me, which helps me run this blog and keep my content free of charge to you. Somewhere between 2010 and and 2011 I stopped Forex Trading and stopped stock picking. It was just too much stress and felt very futile. Reviewing the market on a daily basis was exhausting and I even abandoned market timing with my models (the main gensis for this blog)! I took the “less is more” approach after I read A Random Walk Down Wall Street and realized that if you invest for the long term, you win. Short term? Not much so. ...

I got my ass spanked in the markets over the last year.  My 401k portfolios are surviving after some severe drawdowns (25%) between 2008 and 2009 and my trading capital in my Forex and Stock accounts got destroyed.  Luckily it was only risk capital, money I could afford to lose, but it still hurts anway.  So what did I learn from this hell of a market?  I learned that I’m not as smart as the market and that I tried to second guess it too much.  When times were good my system worked, when times got bad It hammered me.  ...

After I read this WSJ article I realized that we are in the buying opportunity of a lifetime. That is if you are a contrarian, emphasis mine. =) The ups and downs of the market are prompting more retail investors to abandon buy-and-hold strategies in favor of opportunistic trading. Some want more control over their money, so they are fleeing funds and advisers — not to mention the feelings of helplessness raised by recent months’ losses. Some are attempting to recoup their losses, while others are stepping back into the markets after a recent string of stock gains and better-than-expected economic news. ...

Say what you want about Robert Kiyosaki, the author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad, but he’s a smart man. I could help but laugh when I read this line from an interview with The Street.com. “I haven’t been this bullish in years,” says Kiyosaki. “What a buying opportunity. … The stock market goes on sale, and everybody runs away.” But, he’s excited probably only for a short time. “When the market comes back, I go back to sleep,” he says. ...

I roamed around a lot when I lived in New Mexico and I came across several ghost towns. I loved finding them out in the middle of nowhere and poking around in them. If I had more time I would probably researched the reason why they were abandoned but we didn’t stay too long at them. Usually they were on private property and had big “KEEP OUT” signs and we had to always watched out for a Rancher with a big rifle. Still though, the sign and the lure of ghost town adventure didn’t deter my friend Kevin or me! I mean, how could you not be deterred? ...

Ugly posted this interesting LA Times article his Del.icio.us link role a few days ago. It seems that people with upside down mortgages (where your mortgage is greater than the value of your house) are voluntarily letting their properties be foreclosed on. A homeowner who can’t sell his house tells the L.A.Times, “Foreclose me. … I’ll live in the house for free for 12 months, and I’ll save my money and I’ll move on.” ...

I’m going to spend some time updating this old post from 2007 where I had a banner year trading Forex. Granted, this was for a tiny account but I wanted to see if I could really make the returns that everyone was shouting about. The short answer is “YES! but…” There’s always a ‘but’ in when investing, trading, or speculating in any traded market. As promised, see the PDF link below for my entire 2007 Forex trading log. These were actual tickets and trades generated for my $100 Forex Experiment. You can see I had a few ups and downs but my trading equity grew over 50% this year, amazing!!! ...

Babak posted about a possible double top forming in Gold (and Oil) in his blog a few days ago. While I agree with his technical analysis on the daily charts, I disagree with his conclusion that Gold has topped out. In my mind, Gold is driven 80% by fundamental reasons instead of technical analysis. If you look at the weekly chart, Gold looks poised to possibly make a run higher after this consolidation. ...

I live in a semi-rural area of NJ with lots of trees, open space, and great neighbors. My wife has gotten into gardening over the past few years and learned that you can “trade” plants instead of buying them at Lowes and Home Depot. She met this old German couple on the other side of town who transformed their 1 acre property into a virtual Garden of Eden and did so by trading plants with neighbors and friends. They were preparing for the Winter and digging up some of the more temperature sensitive plants when they called my wife and asked if she wanted a few of these plants. Not wanting to pass up anything free, we drove up to their place with a few buckets to collect the tubers. ...