STT (Long) Weekend Lounge 2-6 April 2015

At last!!! ... a topic in which I feel I am well qualified to speak!

After you have read this don't bother scolding me .... I wont listen.

I go looking for themes

Started in the market in 2004. I bought $40,000 HTA @ 27 cents in 2 bites. It went to 33 cents shortly after and then slowly dropped. I did not sell out until they hit 10 cents. Why not you might ask? I thought I could see a theme ... apps, connectivity etc. Correct ... but completely the wrong way to play it. I mistakenly believed the owners of the infrastructure would be the main beneficiaries. Not only that but Hutchison [remember 3?] had absolutely no imagination. I vividly recall talking to the investor relations officer asking him if 3 was going to sell the iPhone .... staggered to hear the answer was no.

OK ... new theme

I decided rechargeable batteries was the go .... therefore Lithium

Bought ADY .... and this time traded it. Does everybody remember Opus Prime? When the GFC hit it was ADY stock which the management was using to cover up black holes in some of the larger accounts. .... All I knew was one day ADY was trading like always ... and then the thing went berserk. Traded my way to breakeven [phew] and got out. One of the guys who went jail had also been a one time director of ADY.

OK ... new theme

Alternative energy ... traded stocks like CNX, BLG, CFU, DYE and on the side INL, CNN, and COZ. The common denominator? All of these companies were under capitalized for the businesses they were in. The lesson I learned ... if a business idea is about some kind of paradigm shift [i.e. it is challenging the status quo] it had better be very, very, very well funded ... because the status quo fights back. But, in all of that I stumbled across LNC. For a while there it looked the goods .... I made a good profit there but in light of its recent history I have to think I was lucky.

After that, I dipped in an out of a few things for a while .... but now, I have a new theme.

Money Printing

I am completely convinced that the biggest financial event this Century is the intervention by central banks. I am also completely convinced it is going to go turtle up big time. When it does there will be a mad scramble for traditional value ... top of that list is gold.

As it happened I found a gold explorer which I fell in love with [SOC]. I started buying at the top ... 23 cents and it is now trading for 0.003. I committed every conceivable sin on this one. [I owned up to it a few weeks ago] .... Whats more, I am still buying.

I do everything that I should not be doing. I do not diversify. It is very common for me to own just one stock. I think the most I have ever held at one time is 6. I try for the big hit [fishing for whales with a 5 pound line]... not the sensible approach of incremental returns. At the moment I am broke ... been broke for a while now. [paying the bills and all that .... but precious little play money]. Not fussed about it though. I have been both wealthy and poor .... might be wealthy again.

In the market, I think, there are many worthy excuses for ending up with stuff in the bottom draw. How many good companies have fallen foul of 'death spiral' financiers? The advent of HFT has been a nightmare. The likes of Credit Suisse etc. employ HFT and are behind many an inexplicable drop in share prices ... as they proceed to attack a company's price in order to accumulate [someone earlier in the thread mentioned Lynas ... apart from its other problems ... it has been short sold into oblivion]. And the recent money printing .... investment funds for entrepreneurial ventures is non existent, all of the cash is going into FX [now the World's largest market by a big margin] and into other purely financial instruments. There are even more reasons now for companies to fail, through no intrinsic fault of their own, than ever before.

It is a good thing I enjoy learning.