The April subprime mortgage originator meltdown halved the value of my portfolio, but my wealth was still near where it had been the previous September. As summer came around, things began to recover and the shock began to wear off. It wasn’t the Amazon debacle, which took about a year to shake.
I had just finished my math of finance program and was preparing for a big move to San Diego to study in UCSD’s economics PhD program. In the meantime I took a bike trip to Slovenia which let me escape my portfolio for a while (though not completely in this era of ubiquitous Internet). I returned home in the midst of earnings season with some time on my hands. It seemed a lot of tech/Internet stocks were reporting their expected numbers and getting pummelled. I shorted RedHat before earnings and booked a quick profit when the pattern repeated. After Priceline.com got pounded, I shorted competitor Interactive Corp (IACI) and profited when it tanked on earnings the next day. Does each earning’s season have a pattern? That one certainly seemed to. I did well on those two trades, but it could have just been luck.
The rest of the year was, by comparison, fairly sedate. I took on two major shorts: EBAY and Whole Foods (WFMI). The first worked out, the latter would turn out to be an even bigger debacle than Amazon on a dollar basis (though much smaller as a percentage of wealth).
By December 20th, NFI had made it back to the high 50s. I was in Mexico at the time and resolved to sell some when I got back to the States, but by that time it had fallen to 50. It would have been a swing trade anyway because I still was bullish on the stock. It never reached those levels again and its fall in recent days has been chronicled in this blog’s daily wrap entries.
But at the end of 2005 I was worried about my shorts of EBAY, which hadn’t worked out yet, and WFMI, which ultimately wouldn’t.
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A Brief Respite (my trading history Pt. 8)
The April subprime mortgage originator meltdown halved the value of my portfolio, but my wealth was still near where it had been the previous September. As summer came around, things began to recover and the shock began to wear off. It wasn’t the Amazon debacle, which took about a year to shake.
I had just finished my math of finance program and was preparing for a big move to San Diego to study in UCSD’s economics PhD program. In the meantime I took a bike trip to Slovenia which let me escape my portfolio for a while (though not completely in this era of ubiquitous Internet). I returned home in the midst of earnings season with some time on my hands. It seemed a lot of tech/Internet stocks were reporting their expected numbers and getting pummelled. I shorted RedHat before earnings and booked a quick profit when the pattern repeated. After Priceline.com got pounded, I shorted competitor Interactive Corp (IACI) and profited when it tanked on earnings the next day. Does each earning’s season have a pattern? That one certainly seemed to. I did well on those two trades, but it could have just been luck.
The rest of the year was, by comparison, fairly sedate. I took on two major shorts: EBAY and Whole Foods (WFMI). The first worked out, the latter would turn out to be an even bigger debacle than Amazon on a dollar basis (though much smaller as a percentage of wealth).
By December 20th, NFI had made it back to the high 50s. I was in Mexico at the time and resolved to sell some when I got back to the States, but by that time it had fallen to 50. It would have been a swing trade anyway because I still was bullish on the stock. It never reached those levels again and its fall in recent days has been chronicled in this blog’s daily wrap entries.
But at the end of 2005 I was worried about my shorts of EBAY, which hadn’t worked out yet, and WFMI, which ultimately wouldn’t.
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