Monday, July 19, 2010

Inadequate But Inspired...


So I had some therapy recently - not for anger management, but I should probably try that, shouldn't I? I was told that people are often like a bottle of penicillin that others have put a poison label on. And it totally resonated with me. I was told to literally rip off the bandaid - the poison label, rather. So today, I'm ripping off the label of sore loser once and for all. Hopefully, I'm really on my way to being a reformed and better trader after spending all this time in the proverbial confessional booth and studying hundreds of balance sheets and getting no results. I also encourage people to rip off their own labels that other people have put on them.

Friday's market action was not only detrimental to my portfolio recovery, but it also caused a severe dent in my bike and consequently my self-esteem.

I didn't quite redeem myself today, but I think I'm much less volatile than last week:

+1.22% on the SBA
+1.36% on the Roth IRA

Volume on many stocks seems to be much lower than usual due to the summer holiday, so I'm not in panic mode just yet. I am seriously contemplating my next course of action with Harry Winston though. The thing about Harry is that I'm not sure what to categorise Harry as. Harry Winston has both mining and retail operations. One can't compare Harry Winston with Tiffany, Bulgari, or any other jewellery retailer and yet, HWD is also not just a miner. There's also the question of how I should factor in KGC to the equation since, if my information is still up-to-date, KGC owns a stake in HWD. It would therefore make sense for me to take into consideration HWD's valuation in relation to KGC.

There's also something very special about Harry Winston. HWD is the only "at-the-source" type stock in my portfolio. I was surprised to see that many miners have a higher market cap than all of the financial stocks I'd been following, which made me realise just how much I'd been neglecting to look at the bigger picture.

And some perma-bears are even speculating that the real unemployment rate is anywhere from 16.5 to 22%.

With the BP incident, right now would be a good time to look at oil companies more closely. I think most of the oil companies have experienced a sell-off and XOM seems to be at a pretty good valuation. If I had the moola, I'd buy into XOM - especially now that the BP incident seems to be contained - hopefully permanently.

I think it's encouraging that Shanghai rallied today and together with the Wen Jiabao EUR endorsement on Friday, I'm looking at placing some JPY pairs in my market cauldron.

Mirror, mirror on the wall,
Who is the wicked-est diva of all?


On a I don't have a life note, after doing some more subsistence farming, I realised that I'm actually quite good with gardening. I would rather be better at trading, but subsistence farming has its benefits as well. So far, I've been able to harvest two servings of lettuce every week along with two succulent, delectable baby zucchini. The carrots are still too tiny, but I've started some more zucchini plants along with some cantaloupe and pumpkin too. It's possible to get arbitraged in gardening too - what, with the birds and all. My subsistence farming made me question... I'm alive, but am I living?

I'll miss my Jardin Secret when I go on holiday, but hopefully I'll meet men like Fu'ad Aït Aattou! Oh, he can comment allez vous me any day...


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