MichaelandChrissy.com

I haven’t thought about my stock in Playboy in quite a while, but I recently found out that it’s down below $5! I have about 30 shares from back when I used to work there. It was my first job in Chicago, and one of the benefits was a discount on company stock. It was the first time that I had even owned securities, so I excitedly scooped some up. I should have merged them with the rest of my stocks by now, but I’ve never gotten around to it.

With the stock valued so low, it’s not really worth doing that right now. I’m waiting for Hef to kick the bucket. That should help the stock price. Some would say that Hef dying would kill the company and nuke the stock, but I think that Christie Hefner will rally the troops with new ideas to save the day. Ideas that would not fly while Hef was alive. I was really impressed with Christie the few times that I heard her speak.  I’m betting that she’s been waiting a very long time to take the company in a more profitable direction.

For example: imagine selling the Playboy Mansion and moving all operations back to Chicago. This would be a very cost-effective move that Hef would never agree to. Or better yet: move all operations from Chicago to New York, where the marketing team is currently located. That’s where most world-renown publications are headquartered anyway. In “an historic move”, Playboy relocates to NYC after selling the Mansion, leaving only their Playboy TV branch in Los Angeles as a satellite office. Bold new move, stocks soar.

And by soar, I mean at least to $30 per share, where I will sell my holdings for $1000. These were at $30 when I bought them, back in the height of the internet bubble with playboy.com about to go public (we were all going to be rich). In the end, I and my paltry sum of profit will claim vengeance over Playboy Enterprises for being snubbed so many years ago (but I won’t get into that story right now).

Summer is usually bad for mining stocks, since the Canadian mining companies are usually doing their thing while it’s warm. The mergers and discovery reports that drive stock prices higher don’t usually happen until the fall or winter. Typically, the stocks drop around April and don’t come back until after September. I thought that I would hang on until then, but I’m not happy with the results.

The stocks started falling in late April, but I was up almost 50% at the time. I figured that they would probably go down 25%, which would leave me up by 25%. However, I had not anticipated a drop in the Uranium spot price from $140 per pound to $90 per pound. Uranium consumers are conspiring to reduce the spot price, which is causing panic selling. As of now, I’m 20% in the hole.

Historically, the Uranium stocks see new highs by January or February. It would be foolish to sell now when the stocks should recover by September or October. The only option now is to hold tight and wait for the recovery in the next month or so. Next year, I’m going to sell everything in April and buy back low in August.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.