The History of GoldminingXpert, a CAPS Autobiography (Part 1)
December 02, 2008
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RELATED TICKERS: GG
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The GMX Retrospective Part 1: The Early Days
This series of posts will take a look back at the the lucky and surprising run of GoldminingXpert from a newbie to a top 10 CAPS rating. In this part, we examine GMX's 2007 CAPS activities... notable for the complete lack of points scored from this era.
7/23/07 On this summer day, I made my first ever pick, a red thumb on Google. This overvalued overhyped stock just had to go down, at least I thought. This pick is representative of the futility of the early CAPS days. This pick would be closed in March, 8 months later, at a three point CAPS gain. What a complete waste of a red thumb. However, some of the other early picks fared slightly better.
As the commodity bubble was still ongoing, I placed green thumbs on USO and (gasp!) Goldcorp (GG). Oil was clearly on the rise, this pick would be locked in at a 38 point gain. I could have had so much more, but at this point, the idea of scoring points on green thumbs was very foreign to me. Throughout my CAPS experience, I've struggled to score points with the green thumb, ending up with lots of 50 point+ losers as my long picks go to zero. The Goldcorp pick was also good as the stock ran up nicely scoring me 27 points. Of course, it also could have been milked for a lot more points before its complete collapse this fall. Also of note from this day, I started work on securing my first score leader on a stock... I picked the piece of junk good for nothing FLOW to go down. At the time, the CAPS community was strongly bullish on this clunker. It's gone from my first pick at $9.61 then to $1.90 today. My five red thumbs on it have scored a combined 45 points while all ending in the green.
10/29/07 It would be another 3 months before I would make more picks. The next batch was inspired not by my own ideas but instead by good old-fashioned CAPS dogpiling. The first of my 7 red thumbs on Countryfried Financial came here along with picks on such notable dogs as Razor “Technologies”, MBIA, the now defunct Worldspace.
11/28/07 GMX makes his first big bold pick, red thumbing TGE (TGC industries), at the time the #1 rated stock on all on CAPS (according to the now departed “Beat the Street”) feature. The top stock amongst the entire community—it now has fallen 80% as the oil bubble collapsed. This is my most proud score leader, as I've riden it from #1 on CAPS to unratable today! I called it junk, but was largely ignored for months. However, my contrarian spirit would continue to grow based off of gutsy decisions like this one. Also notable, I discovered the power of Andrew Left (Citron Research). I redthumbed BIDZ after his blistering pan on the company and I watched with glee as the stock dove. I would go on to make lots of CAPS points and dollars red thumbing and buying puts on the dredge he would find. One final note: 41 of the 43 picks I made between July and the end of November would end up green... only 2 losers out of 41. Note to new players here, you must bank accuracy for your quest to dethrone Specbear to be complete. A lot of good players suffer from too many losers early on and fail to recover. Despite my high accuracy, my CAPS score failed to break 500 at this time. This was the humble beginnings of the GMX CAPS rise towards the top. Next time, we'll cover December of 2007 when the points started coming faster...
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