March 31, 2013 –
|
RELATED TICKERS: DANOY
, RIG
, SD
CAPS calculates points totals for players by looking at "the total percentage return of all his picks subtracting out the S&P." At the beginning of the first quarter of 2013 I decided to begin tracking my quarterly performance here in CAPS and to donate a quarter to charity for every percentage point that I outperform the S&P 500 by. On January 4th, my CAPS points total stood at 5,200. At the close of the quarter on Thursday I had 6,343 points. According to my complex calculations, that means that my CAPS portfolio outperformed the S&P by 1,143 percentage points during Q1. Let's say that I maintained an average of 195 or so active picks during the quarter, this means that on average each stock I went long (I don't short) beat the S&P over the past three months by an average of 5.86%. Not too shabby, considering I did this with none of the usual CAPS tricks and trinkets like shorting ultra-leveraged ETFs or scams. [more]
March 30, 2013 –
You know that you're a value and special situation investor at heart when...you take your kids to an arcade on your day off and you spend the entire time looking for ways to beat the system and get as many tickets as possible for as few tokens as possible. Who cares if the game is fun :) we can get ten times the tickets that we can on other games.
I had my two young sons walking around that coin pushing game that you find on the boardwalk at the shore looking for machines that were only one more good shot away (instead of 5 or 6) from starting the bonus wheel that let's you spin for a chance to win up to 500 tickets.
We found another game where you had to shoot harpoons at virtual fish. The more pounds of virtual fish you shoot the more tickets you get. My oldest son and I found that we could team up to shoot the massive sharks that were surrounded by guards to get the most possible tickets. I took out the screening fish and he would have a clean shot at the shark. They definitely didn't expect people to team up on this one. For four tokens we could consistently get 5 sharks every round for a cool 300 tickets versus the 10 or so that one would get on a normal turn.
Then of course there's one of my favorites, "Deal or No Deal". Where we were calculating the odds that we would beat the bankers' offer. The easiest one to calculate came when we only had two cases left. One that contained 500 tickets and the other that contained 3. Now if you round that off the ideal offer from the banker is 252 tickets, but I told my sons going into it that we're taking anything over 250. That must be my slightly conservative nature kicking in. Well, the banker offered 251. That's a much better offer than some of the lowball ones that the mathine tried earlier. We took it and our case contained...3. Yes! We made the right move. [more]
March 29, 2013 –
|
RELATED TICKERS: STTYD
The million dollar question when it comes to Sandstorm Metals & Energy (STTYF) is when will the company start receiving revenue from the various investments it has made in mining and drilling projects. I have seen a number of what I believe are overly optimistic estimates on this subject over the past several months. [more]
March 28, 2013 –
|
RELATED TICKERS: RDI
, COSH
I don't know if I've mentioned this blog here before, but I always keep an eye on Whopper Investments for cool investment ideas. He posted two particularly interesting ones this week that are very special situation-oriented. [more]
March 28, 2013 –
|
RELATED TICKERS: LEA
MSN - Car sales on a roll in March
"March sales could well be "significantly stronger than February's," said Jason Knapp, who tracks incentives at Autodata Corp., another big market research firm. The company's guess: Sales will be "up between 5% and 10% year-over-year, leaning towards the higher end of that range," Knapp said in an email."
http://money.msn.com/top-stocks/post.aspx?post=2e1c824b-28a2...
That's me ;). There has been some significant changes at my day job lately. I've been given some additional responsibility, some of which make it more likely that I will interact with the media again after taking a break for nearly a decade. I thought that some of you might find this interesting. [more]
RSS Headlines
Fool UK