Archive for the 'Hardly Working' Category

May 23 2007

First Big Win

Published by Michael under Hardly Working

One of my Uranium stocks, Energy Metals (EMU), was rumored to be taken over by another (unknown) company. The stock had a huge run, so now I’m sitting on an 85% profit. However, despite the continued gains, Cramer says to sell. In fact, he called for a triple sell on Friday. Here’s his explanation:

Dear Jim: On Friday’s Lightning Round, you pushed the “sell, sell, sell” button what seemed like a million times after disclosing there is a company in negotiations to acquire Energy Metals Energy Metals Corp (EMU), and did not give a reason for why. I would think one would hold onto EMU as there could be a dollar premium associated with a takeover?also, the fact that uranium is still in demand and commodity prices continue to rise. Could you please explain why you feel EMU deserves to be sold? –Robert

Cramer says: “Bulls make money, bears makes money, hogs get slaughtered. You are about to become Jimmy Dean sausage. We?ve got a great gain in that thing. What are you doing? What do you want, a sharp stick in the eye? I?ll be right over there!”

Since I got into EMU on Cramer’s recommendation, I’m going to get out of it on his recommendation. I believe that the stock will continue to rise until the company is sold. However, this will free up some capital to put into some other Uranium stocks that are poised to jump. Besides, the last time I held onto an 85% gain, I lost almost all of it inside of a week (and the sector has been so volatile lately, why risk it?). So I’ll chalk up my 85% profit on EMU as my first big Uranium win.

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May 17 2007

Deposed

I went into Chicago for my Oracle deposition today. It was a lot longer than I thought it would be, but it wasn’t terrible. It was in a regular meeting room, with two lawyers from each side, a court stenographer and a videographer. There were a lot of questions, and I answered everything as truthfully as I could (sometimes I just didn’t remember the details).

I had never seen a stenography machine before. This is the weird typewriter that a court reporter uses to type in everything that is said during the proceedings. The stenographer asked me to spell a couple of things, like “Endeca” and “PERL”. That can’t be an easy job.

The whole thing was an interesting experience. I don’t think that I would want to be deposed every week, but it wasn’t awful. I wasn’t really nervous until the cross-examining, since I was worried that they would aggressively try to trip me up. The lawyer said that I was the “least combative” witness that he had ever deposed. I guess that means that I was my usual chipper self.

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May 10 2007

Oracle Deposition

Published by Michael under Hardly Working, Stupid Stuff

I have been subpoenaed to appear at a deposition for the case of Infinity Resources v Oracle Corporation. I worked at Infinity about two and a half years ago, and managed the project to implement Oracle i-Store software. I left the company in October of 2004, but the i-Store project died about a year later. Infinity decided to sue Oracle for the costs of software ownership and damages.

I met with the lawyer to prepare for the deposition, and he cautioned that a deposition is not like a normal conversation. You have to take it slow and think about what, exactly, is being asked and what, exactly, you want to say in response to each question. In short, no rambling. So the entire deposition will require an act of will that I may not be able to muster.

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May 01 2007

Australian Mining Decision

Published by Michael under Hardly Working

For the last twenty-five years, Australia has had a national law that limits the number of Uranium mines in operation to three. Three shall be the number of the mining and the mining shall be no more than three (to paraphrase Monty Python and the Holy Grail). On Saturday, the Australian parliament voted to overturn this law, which should allow mining in Uranium-rich areas like Queensland and Western Australia. Many people expected Uranium mining companies with interests in Australia to skyrocket. Unfortunately, the opposite happened.

The problem is that even though the Australian parliament voted to lift the national ban on Uranium mining, the individual state governments still have their own local ban. Queensland Premier Peter Beattie has gone on record stating that he would not lift the ban in his state, which is the exact opposite of what he said before the vote looked like it had a chance. The national vote will put pressure on Queensland and Western Australia to open up to new mining, but I don’t think it will happen overnight.

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Apr 20 2007

Ups and Downs with Stocks

Published by Michael under Hardly Working

My Uranium stock picks had been doing very well. Overall, my portfolio was creeping up on a 50% profit. I was seriously thinking about selling some stock and taking my profits off the table. Jim Cramer, from Mad Money on CNBC, recommends taking profits in equal relation to the rise in percentage, since you never know how long the stock will be up. In retrospect, that would have been a very good idea.

The first Uranium stock consolidation hit and took my profits back down to 25% over the course of two days. I was expecting a slight pullback, but not a 25% drop. Now I’m kinda aggravated that I didn’t take some of that money back, since I knew full well that a consolidation was expected. However, I am in it for the long term, so I guess the best course of action now is to ride it out (and keep this in mind so that I pull out my profits before the next consolidation next April).

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Apr 11 2007

Up 25% So Far

Published by Michael under Hardly Working

I’m starting to see a lot of Uranium news now. The spot price for Uranium hit $100 per pound, which is significant — it’s a psychological barrier that traders have been waiting for. We expect to see the price go to $125 or $140 per pound by the end of the year, but the $100 mark made the news and now more people will want to get in on the bull market.

I can tell that the general public is starting to find out about the uranium profits, since Cameco stock recently jumped up a few dollars all of a sudden. It would seem that Cameco would be a great Uranium stock, since it is the biggest Uranium producer in the world and is listed in the US markets (CCJ). However, what newbies won’t know is that Cameco’s biggest mine, Cigar Lake, is under water right now, which is what has kept the informed investor away from that company.

I’m more than happy to see the prices on my own stocks go up as demand from the general public increases. I just wish that I could invest some more before the hysteria catches on. My sandbox has grown by 25% since I started trading in early March. My hope is that it will grow to 50% by June, and then I’ll take some profits and reinvest in whatever Uranium stock is poised to jump.

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Mar 08 2007

Uranium Stocks

Published by Michael under Hardly Working

I’ve got my own little sandbox now over at E-Trade with a dozen Uranium stocks in it. Last week’s stock market dive bottomed out on Monday, when I backed up the truck to load up on my favorite Uranium picks. That turned out to be good timing, since the international markets began to correct themselves the next day. The Dow jumped over 100 points on Tuesday, and all my stocks went up with it. As of today, my portfolio is up 8% (which includes the trading fees from E-Trade). That’s not bad for two day’s work.

The crash was due to the global markets downturning in a domino effect, so I figured that it would correct itself quickly (unless the entire planet fell into recession, which some experts were warning against). I still have a lot of faith in the Uranium market, and that, coupled with my belief that things would turn around quickly, led me start my portfolio on Monday morning. I’m glad that I did, since I walked away with some great deals.

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Feb 28 2007

E-Trade Account

Published by Michael under Hardly Working

I finally settled on a new online broker, E-Trade. I decided to go with E-Trade because they allowed me to trade Canadian stocks without any hidden fees, even though the per-trade rate was a little higher than the competition. In stark comparison to FirstTrade, I was able to open an E-Trade account and enable bank account access in a few minutes.

Although sending money to my new account was easy, their policy is a five-day wait until you can trade with it. So I won’t be able to do any trading until Monday. I went ahead and set up a “watchlist” with my favorite Uranium stocks though, and something exciting happened. Overnight, my watchlist went up 7%. The next day, it went up another 10%. I was pretty aggravated that no real money was in play, since this would have been a huge initial win.

Then the Shanghai stock market crashed, taking the Dow Jones with it. Yesterday, the Dow dropped over 400 points! My watchlist is now down 10% from where it was two days ago. The downfall of the American markets affected Canada in a big way, apparently. I guess I have until Monday to see where this downward trend is heading. The US markets are already recovering, so I remain hopeful.

With any luck, I’ll be able to jump in at the bottom of it and ride it back up. The watchlist was up 17% from the beginning of the year, so even at 10% down, it’s still 7% ahead in the first quarter. I’ll be “backing up the truck” as soon as I’m able to invest.

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Feb 13 2007

New Online Trading Firm

Published by Michael under Hardly Working

I’m still trying to decide which online trading firm to go with next. I still want to trade in Canadian Uranium stocks, but I’m having trouble finding an online trading firm that will let me do it. Interactive Brokers allows you to do trading directly with the Canadian stock exchange, but they charge a minimum of $10 a month in fees. On the bright side, I can get away with only $2 per trade in commissions and real-time performance tracking.

E-Trade allows you to trade Canadian stocks through the pink sheets, but they don’t do up-to-the-minute tracking of Canadian stocks. I’m not sure if I’d need that, but E-Trade will slam you for $40 per quarter if you don’t make at least 3 trades. Their commissions start at $12.99 per trade, but you have to make 1500 trades per quarter before you get the bargain rate of $6.99. I’ll never see that. E-Trade offers a lot of other services though, including money market funds to store my cash in.

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Feb 12 2007

Exiting FirstTrade

Published by Michael under Hardly Working

Getting out of FirstTrade was almost as bad as getting in. It took several weeks and multiple faxed forms to get the account ready and activate money transfers between my bank and my new trading account. I should have expected to have to go through hell to get my money back out. And if I had, I wouldn’t have been disappointed.

It turns out that they require that the money stay in the account for sixty days before they will return it to you. It’s in the policy that you signed when you got your account. They waived it to thirty days for me because I faxed in proof that my money transfer had cleared the bank. So now I’ve got seven more days to go before the account closes and I get my money back. Good riddance.

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