Frustrations Of A Short Seller

Awoke to discover no shares available to short of my top 2 potential plays—FEED and PSTI. PSTI was no biggie, it wasn’t a multi-day runner, but missing FEED pissed me off cuz it was a nice morning setup for a solid PREDICTABLE fall.

Yesterday it looked like it was getting tired, but it still wouldn’t crack. Today, near the market open, there was a 14,000 share buy order at $15.40 and as that got taken out rather quickly, it was clear sign to short as longs who were up big over the past few days surely were afraid of a reversal. Sure enough, the morning tank was on as it quickly took out stop losses at $15 on its way to $14.70-ish, a nice 70 cent/share drop from an easy entry. Sure, it rebounded over the rest of the day—impressive really, but then again it’s a true breakout so I expect the stock to be stronger than a pump and dump—but the play here was to cover into the stop loss panic. Next!  

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Did I Do That? Pump & Dump Exposes And Revolutionary Finance Websites

With my CNOA pump and dump expose last night and it’s 25% tankage today, I gotta wonder:

Possibly, probly, who knows…too bad I wasn’t short the stock myself—gotta learn to short sell these suckers BEFORE I chop ‘em to pieces, a la business models of Citron Research and Mark Cuban’s ShareSleuth.com

Nahhhhhhhh a.) it didn’t fit my pattern and b.) it’s more fun to write brutally truthful articles about stocks in which you have no positions, you do it just cuz it’s the right thing to do

I’ll tell you one thing I definitely did do right, that’s hiring and tirelessly working with Pallian to design the new site, which is looking redonkulous! I mean the guy is an Indian Picasso, he should be called Ghandcasso or Picandhi. To you lucky 50, advertisers and bloggers, the beta invites are being emailed out, so def. let me know what you think—what you like and don’t like, the site is for you—and for everyone else, you gotta wait til May 1st and settle for clicking the little thumbnail below:

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It’s My Birthday And I’ll Send Out Beta Invites If I Want To!

Today is my 27th birthday , woooo hooooo! Seems like just the other day I was this crazy looking kid in the picture below:

Guess which one is me–yah, that pic alone is enough crazy celebration for one day, back to business. Unlike every other year, I’m not doing anything special—got a bunch of blog posts to write, ideas to research, radio interviews tonight and an early morning flight to beautiful Buffalo tomorrow (speaking at U of B’s business school tomorrow night if you’re in the area!) Yup, I’m one motivated SOB—this ain’t about the $, it’s about cutting through all the industry BS and teaching you guys to profit from it—never forget that.

Instead of getting cool presents—I don’t need much, all the expensive stuff I’ve ever got has broken, been lost or I’ve become bored with rather quickly—I thought I’d give you guys something—to the first 50 people who leave a comment on this post will get access to a special sneak preview of my new website, which, no more f%#$en excuses will debut on May 1, 2008, and will feature the first episode of the long-awaited / much-hyped TIMtv!

Yah, I know the website was supposed to be done today, but there’s just too much cool stuff out there and since I’m hoping this new site will outlast this current one (what’s it been 2 months?) and the last one (4 months) (ahhh my commitment issues are getting worse!), I just have to add everything, Super Shredder-style.

So, go on, leave a comment and open the present I’m gonna email you!

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6 Small Cap Plays: Natural Gas Stocks Are White Hot

(BEXP) If I wasn’t such a wus at buying breakouts—preferring to short later, this would be the play…4 million shorts getting squeeeeezed

(PSTI) Another day, another multi-billion dollar drug market mentioned by the company, what could go wrong? Respect the pump but don’t believe the hype–we’re talking pre-clinical here, motor oil works at that stage, doesn’t mean it’ll stand up when they actually start testing humans! Risk-reward of shorting this sucker here, well, sucks…pray for a big short squeeze , don’t get squeezed yourself

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On CNOA, CNBC Aids And Abets Penny Stock Promoters

Let me start by saying I have no problem whatsoever with penny stock promotion—these tiny / failing / fraudulent companies need all the exposure / hype they can get or else they’ll never raise any capital and fail / be exposed as the frauds that they are soon rather than later. But I do take offense when entertainment outlets like CNBC try to pass themselves off as credible researchers. As I’ve posted HERE and HERE, their bumbling has hurt too many investors and they’ve helped make people afraid of penny stocks—which I cannot permit.

Now, one of their wannabe journalists / entertainers, Sri Jegarajah, has written the single most naïve penny stock article I’ve ever read, “Wild About Rice” in which Sri mistakes paid-for stock promotion for credible research forcing me to explain the rules of the game to all the poor schmucks who mistakenly view CNBC as a credible source.

Besides quoting CNOA’s CEO (we all know how useless that is, what’s he gonna admit the company’s a pump and dump scheme?), and a Seeking Alpha article—whose writers are no more qualified than bums begging for change on the street, Sri proudly quotes Source Advisors, forgetting (not realizing?) to mention they’ve been paid $25,000 “by a third party” (pump and dumper, cough, cough) to publish their BS report. And, as if to repent for his sins, Sri closes out the article quoting Patrick Murphy of Murphy Analytics who was only paid $1,000 for his efforts (scroll down to the bottom and be better than Sri, aka read the disclaimer).  

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Why Traders Should Ignore Corporate Mergers And The Financial Media Circus

Thanks to this high profile acquisition news of Blockbuster and Circuit City, the financial media circus is working overtime today. CNBC, Fox Biz, Reuters, WSJ, WWE, Marketwatch, AP, Minyanville, TheStreet.com, Portfolio, Bizjournals, Techticker, Motley Fool, SmartMoney.com, Barrons, Businessweek, RealMoney, Forbes, FT, CNNMoney, Briefing.com and of course the Richmond Times-Dispatch have each written articles about it. No joke, seriously, check out the Yahoo! Finance news list—it’s reminiscent of my media logo collage.

Within hours, we now have quotes from higher and lower-ups from both companies, competitors of both companies, industry observers, industry non-observers, economists, ANALysts , marketers, talking heads, journalists—everybody’s giving their useless opinion as to what this news means for consumers, competitors, investors, traders, the industry, other industries, society and the universe. Not to even mention all message board and blog buzz from those too unskilled to even gain entrance to the media circus (true gutter trash / waste of webspace)

Here’s my take:  

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Which Would You Prefer: $1 Million Or 1 Million Page Views?

As detailed by Chapter 8 in my book An American Hedge Fund, I made my first million dollars in 4 years and before my 22nd birthday, hitting that mark—post-tax—after making $80,000+ on one crazy trade over a satellite internet connection while aboard a cruise ship in the South Pacific! (seriously)

Yesterday—just 6 months into my blogging adventure and two days before my 27th birthday, this website hit the coveted 1 million views mark.

Since that first $1 million, it’s been a wild 5 years filled with tremendous ups and downs but the learning has never stopped. Obviously if I had to choose between dollars vs. page views, I’d choose dollars, but this event is still significant because this website is my future and I’m forever grateful to all you readers out there for checking in regularly enough to make this business model—trading, writing, teaching all with brutal honesty—viable. Since this technology is all still pretty new, I really believe this is just the beginning.
So, thank you—truly—I think this is only gonna get better and while I still have yet to get to the $2 million mark—post-tax—at this site’s current pace, we should hit 2 million views inside of the next 100 days…sounds like a good excuse for a party, right?

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5 Penny Stock Trading Misconceptions

Thanks to my talent for self-promotion, I’ve been exposed to a crazy number of investors, traders and market theories. Here are a few misconceptions that keep popping up and are in desperate need of correcting:

1.You can’t short sell stocks under $5, you’re a liar and a fraud!

Ridiculous, of course you can! There’s no SEC rule against it, many crappy brokers just don’t allow it—hence their “crappy” title. If you want to learn PennyStocking, shorting low priced stocks is essential—that’s why I use Thinkorswim, I’m proud to do all my trading there—they rock!

2. Smallcap and microcap trading is a joke, if you want to prove yourself as a trader, trade large stocks, currencies or futures. Also, what kind of a trader is afraid to use leverage?

Thanks in no small part to the misguided, and ultimately harmful, teachings of yet another entertainment outlet masquerading as journalists, Traitor Monthly, many people think trading is about making the most, being the best and getting to the top the quickest. Screw that! Focus on long-term earning and learning—this isn’t a sport as your career doesn’t end when you’re 35-40 (it’s usually just beginning)—and look for high percentage profits wherever they might be. Yes, my niche will always be looked down upon cuz it’s unscalable and that’s just the way I like it.

All the smartest people ignore it so it’s an easier playing field—advantage me. I guess I’ll just have to console myself with annual profit potential of a few hundred thousand to a few million/year. Boo hoo.

And no, I’ll never use leverage—as these street peddlers are learning, yes, it can inflate profits, but it risks disaster. I’ll never advocate any strategy that risks disaster—short selling is risky enough as it is. Learn from the mistakes of the past—nothing is ever guaranteed…besides, if a strategy is worthwhile, the profits will be there and they’ll be hard earned and natural.  

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8 Pumped Up Stocks To Watch For The Upcoming Week

(FEED) Strong volume breakout, most likely due to the after-hours Forbes article—you don’t think somebody leaked that, of course they did! This industry is far more corrupt than you could ever imagine, don’t bother digging for the truth, just profit from it….based on its chart alone, I coulda woulda shoulda bought into the close on Friday, but now it’s too late…hopefully we can get a big naïvely-optimistic-investor spike to short into…c’mon piggies, don’t read my blog, just buy buy, buy!!

(CNOA) Chinese rice play—pumped by the surprise tag team of CNBC and penny stock promoters—in depth article to follow tomorrow—be careful here, all is not is not kosher, not by a long shot

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