"Watch your thoughts; they become words. Watch your words; they become actions. Watch your actions; they become habits. Watch your habits; they become character. Watch your character; it becomes your destiny." -- unknown

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results - Albert Einstein

Pretty fucking dull
September 25, 2008 - 10:26 am

Did I do any research? No, not really. Ok, not at all.

What did I do? Well... you see in my ROTH IRA a while back more or less put all my eggs into the basket of Sirius and.. that's tanked. I mean... at over $3 and rode the fucker all the way down to like $0.80. The thing of that was.. I'm firmly in the camp of if the FCC hadn't dicked around for over a year, the stock would have 'worked'. However... with a year's worth of innovation, new products, and people generally being less optimistic (not to mention buying few cars and gadgets), the stock sucks.

So... decided I wanted out of it since it had no prospects.. and being annoyed at myself for waiting so long...

I did the reverse and went totally impulsive.

What stock has been battered and I mean beat to nothing with this credit crisis?

Well... why not look at Freddie and Fannie? They've been through the wringer and still have government backing. But... which one?

Answer to that is.. it doesn't matter. They are pretty much tied at the hip, so one is as good as the other, right?

I picked Freddie Mac. I moved my $0.80ish SIRI to a $0.785 FRE... basically an even swap, minus the commissions. This was.. uhm... Monday.

Too bad I didn't think to do this last week when FRE was in the $0.30 range.

Where is it today? Well, as we speak it's at $2.33. This means it's up 190%. This means in a handful of days I've basically tripled my money. Which is nice.. since SIRI basically cut my money into a third. Now don't get excited, we aren't talking big money at all.. no loans from me.

But.. pigs are greedy and get slaughtered right? Turns out.. there's a wicked nice tool just for this occasion. It's called a Trailing Stop Loss order. Basically.. I can put the order in and if the stock falls by x%, I sell. I don't need to pay attention. I can set it to be 10% off the high or 20% and sell all or some. Fantastic. Totally playing with the houses money at this point and with the TSL order submitted, I can just wait and see how high it goes and not worry about losing it all again.

Should I sell some? Perhaps, but put it where? A stock in $2 range with strong prospects to keep rising is hard to find. This used to be a $50+ stock I believe.. and it has (had?) a $1 dividend. Buying in so low, any dividend will be nice.

Anyway.

I'm reminded of a little exercise I did about five years ago. I pretended I had $10,000 and picked 10 stocks to watch.. or $1,000 each. 7 of the 10 stocks did swimmingly. I lamented then I didn't have the cash to actually buy those stocks.. and to bad I didn't have $10k for this little goldmine.

But.. before I'll start to dig into stock again, I need to address my debit. Thanks grad school and credit cards whilst in school to live on.

I suppose... a great part of what I do with my boring life these days is put things into order. I cleaned/organized the condo and now I'm working on my finances.

Color me... well, pretty fucking dull, but at least I'm smiling today.