Board 8 > Stock Topic 13

(+) Yeah! (+)

I did share it but this is the first post I've made with the term "ETF" in it that it seems anybody has been able to see =)

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BLNK is up 20% today.

Lol

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AVCT is making me so hard right now. Someone take away my hopium

So glad I didn't sell anything for CYDY lol


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For the first time ever, every stock I just bought into is going up.

Convince me to not sell!!!

You will make 5k easy with big five if you hold till $14

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When will that happen?

I have calls for 1/15/21 and 2/19/21 at $15 which should give you an idea of how quickly I expect this one to move. But War would be the one to ask.

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Nanis stock market sin #543 -

Getting mad there is no fucking justice in the Stock Market business
Good companies I invest in drop for months while shitty companies like Gamestop are increasing by 500% in 3 months
I need to stop thinking about this

But I can't

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Lmao Nanis, have you made any money yet? Are you in the red grand total?

Nanis, you need a major mindset change about this. You seem to believe your evaluations of stocks are so good it is unjust for the market to move differently, yet when asked, you also admit you have no reasoning behind your stock decisions at all besides fear (either fear of missing out or fear of losing money). And fear is worse than useless at stock investing or trading.

There are some contradictions here.

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Sunroof posted...

Lmao Nanis, have you made any money yet? Are you in the red grand total?

I am dancing all around the break even for months now
This is impossible

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red sox 777 posted...

Nanis, you need a major mindset change about this. You seem to believe your evaluations of stocks are so good it is unjust for the market to move differently, yet when asked, you also admit you have no reasoning behind your stock decisions at all besides fear (either fear of missing out or fear of losing money). And fear is worse than useless at stock investing or trading.

There are some contradictions here.

I know
This is hopeless

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Where you standing on ATHX these days @Lopen ? I haven't kept up at all, but I just might go through with that plan to throw AVCT profits that way in the coming weeks.

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I know I am looking at this wrong
I know it's all fucked up and confusing and contradictionary

But I don't know how to fix any of this
The COVID market crash also crushed every confidence I had. Every logical decision I ever made. I am driven by fear. I thought that it would pass, but it doesn't. It's been 9 months since we hit the bottom and I can't make any money

I joined the stock Market in April 2019. In my peak, I used to invest $90k at the same time. At the peak, I had a profit of $17k.
And I lost everything. Every single profit I ever made from April 2019 to Feburary 2020 is gone. a profit that took 10 months to make, gone in 2 months. I am dancing around the break-even since March. Whenever I somehow make a profit, something fucks up and it sends me back down in an instant
This is like running uphill. You can try and climb steady and slowly, but when you trip and roll down you will reach the bottom fast

And I feel like the more I read, the more group chats I join, the less I know and the less confidence I have.
A few days ago when I was at PLTR, it was up 4% pre market. Someone in a group chat sent a article about a stock firm calling PLTR overpriced or something, I went to check if it affected PLTR, and it was down to +1%. I panic sold. Only then I realized that article was 2 days old. I felt like a complete and fucking idiot. If I wasn't in that group chat, it wouldn't happen!

I remember I used to make a topic here about TSLA. I bragged how I made a monthly salary in 2 days. I had $15k on Tesla, and in 2 days it jumped 30%. That was the day I reached my peak. Ever since then it's all downhill

Nowadays? The most I am willing to invest in a stock is $2500
I wish I could fix this, but how?

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Well I don't have time for an incredibly long and measured reply but I think you are at a disadvantage simply by not being American. I've read enough of your posts over the months to know that you kinda don't know how some things are here. Can't tell you anything specific in regards to how I see this though

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Nanis23 posted...

I know
This is hopeless

I know the feeling. Not from trading stocks, but from other contexts. You can't trade well because you are paralyzed with fear. It affects your decisionmaking, and affects it badly. Fortunately, you haven't actually lost money, being at breakeven. Since it's very hard to overcome fear, I think the easy way out is to let someone else manage the money.

So, if I were you I'd take out enough cash to feel comfortable that you will have no short-term financial difficulties, then wait for the next dip in the market, and when that happens split the remaining funds between SPY, QQQ, ARKK, and BRKB. This gives you two passive index funds, and two actively managed funds (Berkshire is basically a fund) with very different strategies and a history of success. Then do not sell unless something substantive has changed to make one of these investments no longer good. A decline in value of even 50% is not a reason to sell by itself. Buying more when you can add more money is fine, but don't sell.

If one of the 4 outperforms the others significantly, sell some of that one and buy the other ones until you are back to close to balance. One big reason for rebalancing like this is to avoid making the overall portfolio risky enough to make you fearful. Because if you have an outsize amount in one thing (say if ARKK replicated this year and ended up at 50% of the portfolio instead of 25%), it's easier to feel fear if you see big daily losses.

If you get to the point where you don't feel paralyzing fear when thinking about stocks, you can think about going back to actively managing trading yourself and if that's something you want to do.

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I mean tbh right now airlines haven't been too sexy lately (maybe wrong? I have been really busy). BA is spinning it's tires. Probably looking for a break out. I like this buy in price frankly at 220.

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StartTheMachine posted...

Where you standing on ATHX these days @Lopen ? I haven't kept up at all, but I just might go through with that plan to throw AVCT profits that way in the coming weeks.

ATHX just had some enrollment news which has given it positive momentum after stagnating for months.

I expect a minor spike of some sort in January from Healios news. I've had a stack of $2 calls I bought way back in September (stupid of me, I could have 3x the stack size if I'd held off longer since I didn't expect them to really start moving till November) how big is anyone's guess but I definitely see them as being higher by the end of January than they are now. Now is a decent time to buy in I'd say especially since it dipped today-- get out by end of January unless the news is REALLY good. But yeah good news could come any day now and January was always the ETA

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red sox 777 posted...

I know the feeling. Not from trading stocks, but from other contexts. You can't trade well because you are paralyzed with fear. It affects your decisionmaking, and affects it badly. Fortunately, you haven't actually lost money, being at breakeven. Since it's very hard to overcome fear, I think the easy way out is to let someone else manage the money.

So, if I were you I'd take out enough cash to feel comfortable that you will have no short-term financial difficulties, then wait for the next dip in the market, and when that happens split the remaining funds between SPY, QQQ, ARKK, and BRKB. This gives you two passive index funds, and two actively managed funds (Berkshire is basically a fund) with very different strategies and a history of success. Then do not sell unless something substantive has changed to make one of these investments no longer good. A decline in value of even 50% is not a reason to sell by itself. Buying more when you can add more money is fine, but don't sell.

If one of the 4 outperforms the others significantly, sell some of that one and buy the other ones until you are back to close to balance. One big reason for rebalancing like this is to avoid making the overall portfolio risky enough to make you fearful. Because if you have an outsize amount in one thing (say if ARKK replicated this year and ended up at 50% of the portfolio instead of 25%), it's easier to feel fear if you see big daily losses.

If you get to the point where you don't feel paralyzing fear when thinking about stocks, you can think about going back to actively managing trading yourself and if that's something you want to do.

Thank you, red. I have noticed you have been very helpful when responding to me, and I want to say thank you very much. No, really, thank you from the bottom of my heart!

I know of SPY, QQQ and BRKB. But I never checked ARKK before..and wow, holy hell, this thing does not know to go down?
I have more confidence in funds because they go up like..almost always. And if they don't, this means the whole market is fucked anyway so it's not like I could have done any better
So yeah, I will just wait for a red week. It doesn't look like something might trigger it soon (unless the new COVID from the UK is someone immune to the vaccine) but I can wait - I do have some money in anyway
Currently holding Teva (big mistake), NVDA, CRM, PLTR and QQQ
All of them are in small amount

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Hey Nanis

You fix this by doing one of two things:

1) You develop a process for choosing stocks that you are comfortable with and confident in, that does appropriate due diligence and that can manage your tendencies to overreact. If you have a process you are confident in, you can more ably trust your decisions without bowing to outside pressure and making panic decisions. You'd also want to establish rules for yourself to manage that fear in general.

2) You realize you aren't cut out for actively managing your investments That's okay. 99.99% of people aren't. It's possible that NONE of us in here are. ETF's and similar things are made for this purpose. There are people whose jobs are to make you money - you can put some level of trust that they will do it. You can find ETF's that meet your level of risk.

I will now share my investing mindset. I think you should consider how much of what I'm doing, you are doing, before you even really consider thinking you are ready to continue #1 above.

I only started investing a three months ago. For some background on me, I am an accountant for a publicly traded retail company. I recently passed the CFE, which is the once a year final exam to become a CPA in Canada. This isn't meant to claim I know all about this stuff - I think I know very little about how the stock market works. But what this does do is give me the financial literacy that allows me to feel relatively comfortable looking at a company's financial statements and assessing their relative health.

I'm new to actually directly investing, so I've been starting relatively small $500-1k investments in individual companies. I do a lot of reading of what people are talking about online and identify stocks I think sound interesting. I do a qualitative assessment - I wonder to myself whether what people are saying about the company and its goals and the industry it is in makes sense. Do I think this company has room to grow within its currently existing industry? Will that industry itself grow overall in the future, which would give that company opportunity to grow? If these seem reasonable, this company might be on the table. I also need to ask myself why I heard about this stock - am I being misled by somebody that's just trying to generate buzz and pump up the stock so they can sell? That's mega common on reddit, so that's always an important question to ask. I don't want to be the sucker buying at the inflated price, my goal is to be the guy buying a the low price, after all. If I'm suspicious about this at all, then the stock is no longer on the table.

I also think it's important at this stage to come up with some arguments why this stock might drop - if it's just as convincing or more so as the ideas on why it would grow, then

Then I do some quantitative analysis. I can't say I do anything too indepth - i've seen moderators on r/stocks say that stock prices are determined by the most widely known Discounted Cash Flow projections, and nothing else matters for stock prices. I've also seen people say that in general all future events that are expected to happen are currently priced into the stock. I don't really believe either of these things are true. I think a stock's price is pretty far from divorced from *any* objective measure of value, and vary based on whims not that different from your fear buying/selling. So trying to determine what the "right" price to me seems pretty impossible. People talk about setting price targets but I'm not sure if there's actual genuine merit behind that. I might try to do my own DCF's in the future, since I don't think they are completely useless, but I don't think they are the definitive guiding factor some think they are so I haven't bothered for now.

Right now, I mostly just take a high level look at important income statement items, and whether a company is making profit at all, and if they aren't, there better be a VERY good reason why it's not and why it'll likely change soon. I'll look for since of distress on the balance sheet - do they have cash to maintain operations? Are they overleveraged on debt? You might recall I pushed gravy on whether Boeing really has the cash reserves to weather the pandemic before I bought into it. Some might say these aren't really that indepth questions, and I would agree, but this is currently the lengths I'm going to. Generally, my mindset is "if company do good in future, stock price go UP!!" which may not technically be true but its the guiding light I go by right now.

So I ask these questions, and if everything feels good to me, then I'll consider buying the stock. I'll look at the recent price history and see if anything looks really funny. If it's been rising sharply recently, I might reconsider. You might recall that I bought AMD right before it's Ryzen 5 press conference - it has risen ten dollars to $87 right before that conference, and I got in, then it fell to $83 immediatley, and went even below $80 a little at some points. When I made that purchase, I saw that the rising trend had happened, and decided I thought AMD was a strong enough buy that even if the price falls after the conference, I think in the long term it'll rise again, so I was okay with $87. It is at $92 now. So I was right... but the profits are slim and if AMD falls I'll be in a loss again if I don't sell. I bought more at $82 in a separate account and track it separately and that's looking way more profitable.

I learned a lesson from that trade and have created a new rule for myself - If I see a stock rising sharply very recently, I'm just not going to buy it, no matter what the hype is. There is risk I'm at the top of a peak that's about to collapse, that's not where I want to be. If I do my due diligence and decide AMD is a good buy, and then look and see it has risen sharply lately.... I'm just gonna wait and see what happens. If it drops and my decision that it's a good buy still holds, then I can buy! Or even if it stays level. If it continues to skyrocket, then oh well. I can go into something else I feel more comfortable with.

After all - I was strongly considering buying PLTR just as it was taking off, but backed off since it was just too hot of a meme stock for me right at the last second. So instead that day, I bought.... ARKG, an ETF that has given me 40% returns. Sure, I missed that immediate PLTR boost, but at the time of my decision making, I just could not justify it. Looking at it now with hindsight doesn't mean I should have done it. My warning flags told me not to do it, and if I develop those enough to determine safe investments, I think I will be better off.

Then, once I've made the investment, I hold the stock. I hold it. I don't react quickly to any news. If it seems like there's bad news.... I'll see what happens. If it drops, well, that sucks. I'll hold it some more and see what happens. News would need to be TRULY dire for me to think "ok i need to sell this RIGHT NOW and protect my money!!". I'm actually not sure yet what my criteria for when the right time to sell is. I'm willing to accept a loss on a sale if I think it won't come back, and I'm also willing to sit on a stock that's currently at a loss for it to come back up. I think generally though, it comes down to just looking at the stock again as if I don't own a position and thinking "would I buy this? is there potential here if buy this?" and if the answer is no then it's probably time to sell. Note that buying a stock when you have none of it is not the same decision as buying more of a stock that you already are in, so try and parse out that difference.

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Ultimately, I need a good reason to sell just like I need a good reason to buy. Catastrophic news about company losing the patents to all of its products might just be a good enough reason to sell, but a 5% dip for no apparent reason for me wouldn't be.

All of this is primarily aimed at identifying stocks that I want to buy and hold for long term growth. If your goal is a lot more short term, IE I want to buy this and sell it next week or even later this afternoon, then you need to develop a set of criteria that makes you confident in identifying those trends. And I think that criteria would focus even more heavily on the suspicion I mentioned earlier about reddit pumping stocks...

All in all- this condenses into a process that I follow as such:

1) Identify a potential stock.
2) Identify qualitatively why this stock might do well in the future, and try to play devils advocate and find reasons it might fail. Keep an eye out for scammer/pumpers
3) quantitative analysis of the health of the business.
4) Gutcheck on if the recent movement of the stock price is signaling whether this is bad time to buy.
5) if everything seems good... then buy!
6) hold until you have a good reason to sell.

This also includes several rules, including a) don't buy a stock that has seen a sharp rise in the last week or so and b) no options until 2022, we don't understand the regular stocks enough to even think about that. Rules to restrict myself from bad decision making are just as important as the reasons to justify a good stock. I think its critical after making a mistake on a trade to reflect on if there was a mistake in my decision making, and change my process accordingly. In the future, I should avoid making that same mistake.

So this is the process that I follow. Under this process, I have made gains on every trade I have made, including AMD, ARKG, ARKK, CWB.TO, NET, and BA. The only bad trades I've made were the bankrupt penny stocks Lopen told me not to invest in... I'll baghold those $50 investments until the day I die.

So anyways, I've made gains. But does this make me think I know what I'm doing? Honestly? I think I don't. When I ask myself if I think my method is good enough to do better than the general investing population, I don't really think so. I think my trades so far have just been somewhat lucky. There's an ocean of stocks out there - I like to think I'm a savvy investor, but how could I identify the good stocks that nobody is talking about? How can I *really* be confident that a stock is going to do well? I may have made gains, but I think so far all I've done is make guesses on stocks other people are already talking about, at a time when stocks are often rising to recover from the COVID plummet. I've never invested before, but my feeling is that right now is an easy time to make money, and that in a normal year, it will be tougher to make choices that gain significantly.

So what does that mean? It might be better if I just find some ETF's that align with my high level ideas and let them handle the actual managing of stocks. Does this mean I might not make as much money as someone doing a great job of trading stocks on the regular? Yeah... but if I'm not confident I can be that guy doing a great job trading stocks on the regular, then it's irrelevant. I'm giving myself until the end of 2021 to play around with stocks and decide if I think i know what I'm doing enough to continue investing with stocks. (no options until 2022 is therefore no coincidence).

Even if I do think I should manage stocks myself - I still think I shouldn't trust myself completely, therefore I want to assign 50-80% of my portfolio to ETF's and let them do their thing, and see what I can do with the remainder. After I made a few successful trades, that's why I pivoted to going into ARK.

So, coming back to you, Nanis. You need to ask yourself why you think *you* should be managing your own stocks. Do you think you have a set of criteria to base good decisions on? When you look over what I've said about my own strategy, the steps that I take to make myself feel confident in an investment, do you have any sort of similar requirements of yourself before you make a trade? Your own guidelines don't need to be like mine. They don't need to go as far as I do or they could go much farther. But for you to make those trades, you should have some kind of basis to ground yourself with. When you do make trades and make mistakes, do you think you are learning from those mistakes, and taking care to avoid them the next time a similar situation comes up/

If you don't have any kind of process - do you think it would be worthwhile to come up with something? Do you have the discipline to follow the process you've developed for yourself?

A big thing that has come up over and over is your fear of missing out that drives you to buy and your fear of losses that drives you to sell - do you think you can establish rules on yourself to force yourself not to do this? IE - something like my rule not to buy stocks that have sharply increased, or a rule that you can't sell a stock the same day you get bad news?

I think if you want to continue trading - you need to get to a point where you are confident in your trades, no matter how you do it. If not, you should strongly consider the managed fund route.

Thank you for your time, I hope this has been at all helpful.


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To anyone else that bothers to read this: I welcome any criticism of my mindset or method

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Damn, I thought that I was sucking being up 10% since March. Would have done way better in an index fund but some of the mistakes were really dumb and good learning

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greengravy294 posted...

Well I don't have time for an incredibly long and measured reply but I think you are at a disadvantage simply by not being American. I've read enough of your posts over the months to know that you kinda don't know how some things are here. Can't tell you anything specific in regards to how I see this though

Maybe but we told him to hold onto Apple and its up 10 percent since then.

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Let my 7 year old pick a stock to buy and he picked TUSK.... which went up 12% today.

He decided to sell so I gave him half he money and we made $50 in 2 days haha

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neonreaper posted...

Maybe but we told him to hold onto Apple and its up 10 percent since then.

True

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I'll preface this by saying that probably no one can time the market, and the following is just my feelings. But, be that as it may, I am feeling a (probably temporary) market top soonish. Probably after New Year's, as positive emotions are riding high before Christmas, and people aren't paying attention to the stock market during the week between Christmas and New Year's. After New Year's, people will return to the reality that the world has not changed, and that it will still be months before the vaccine has enough coverage to really reopen society back to how it was. And it will still be winter, cold, and with little daylight.

I'm trying to unload stocks that I feel are tied to the market/pandemic situation. Actually, I've already largely shifted out of these since the vaccine news came out last month and now it's only 27% of my portfolio that's still in this category. The trouble is that for what's left, I'm long term bullish. Also, all but one of them are in the green and would trigger more taxes if I sold, and the one that's in the red is in the red by only $16. I guess I could buy a burger at McDonald's with the tax savings from selling that.

I was thinking about selling some of my position in AirBNB around $172 yesterday and by the time I made up my mind to do it, it had fallen off of that. I set a limit order at $173 but that never hit and now it's at $160. I think I may end up selling half my position today anyways.

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Loosely responding/commenting on some of the points in CoolCly's very detailed and informative post:

I absolutely agree that it's a good idea to have someone else manage a portion of your assets. This is a form of diversification, where even the asset manager is diversified. It avoids the very serious risk of oneself making one or more major mistakes, and not realizing it until after a large percentage of the portfolio has been lost.

Regarding discounted cash flow analyses, I do think that in theory, the value of a stock should equal its discounted future cash flows. The trouble is that a DCF analysis has a lot of unknown parameters, so it can't really be calculated with any great degree of accuracy. The biggest unknown is the future growth or decline of the company - and a DCF analysis requires you to make predictions about these events, which lie in the future and therefore can't possibly be known.

In practice, the problem with doing DCF analyses myself is that I don't think I can do it better than the analysts at Wall Street banks and hedge funds doing the same thing as their job. In fact, I'd probably do it worse than them, and wind up making worse investments for relying on subpar DCF analyses. I have no advantage, and I probably would have a disadvantage if I tried to do this.

Which leads into what I am looking for in a stock, which is an advantage. A reason I believe that I have an edge over other market participants with regard to that trade. Usually, the only consistent advantage that can be found is willingness to take on riskier positions. This is because people are risk averse, so they are willing to pay a premium to avoid risk. And there are market participants such as pension funds that are highly risk averse, and are willing to give up a lot of risk premium to avoid that risk. This is why stocks usually have better average returns than bonds - they are more risky. And why growth stocks have better average returns than stalwarts - they are more risky.

I am of the opinion that you can use the risk premium concept as a guide to timing individual stocks as well. Warren Buffett says to buy when people are fearful, and sell when they are greedy, and I believe this is why. When people are fearful, they are willing to pay more in risk premium. When they are greedy, they are willing to pay less in risk premium.

Looking at the other side of this trade illustrates it well. Suppose we have a fearful trader who has done a very thorough analysis of ABC corporation and believes its stock should be worth $25, based on a 50% chance of going bankrupt and a 50% chance of being worth $50 if the company survives. The stock is trading at $20 so he buys it. Unfortunately shortly after buying, the stock craters to $15. Fearful trader is so fearful of losing all his money that he sells a stock for $15 that he thinks should fairly be valued at $25. You want to be on the opposite side of the trade. Fearful trader is paying you $10 a share to take on the risk of this trade. That $10 is above the fair value of the company, and, provided it's a small enough portion of your portfolio that you can handle the risk, it's basically pure profit to you. That is your "advantage."

And this is also why trading based on fear will get you worse results on average than choosing stocks randomly.

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Note that you should only expect to get a risk premium advantage if you are actually taking on someone else's risk. I don't think you should expect such an advantage from using margin, or buying options, because you aren't relieving a counterparty's risk, even though those things can be very risky to you.

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Got into Bandwidth. Down today for seemingly no reason. Motley Fool recommends it.

Is Baba a good buy now or a dangerous falling knife

Cool I will read your long post later lol

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I put another $25k into Visa. Based on the Kramer article I sent a few weeks ago, its literally guaranteed money.

Baba will probably be up next trading day. This is a pretty big dip although based on understandable news. Something about China antitrust. Itd be a bit risky but thats how you make dinero sometimes.

Welp my account is up 8 grand today at the moment. AVCT you beautiful bastard

And yes I am selling ALL my shares on some news this time if it happens, not making that mistake twice lol. All we have so far is more huge insider buys being filed.

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Nanis23 posted...

Is Baba a good buy now or a dangerous falling knife

Jeeeesus fucking christ

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Sunroof posted...

Baba will probably be up next trading day. This is a pretty big dip although based on understandable news. Something about China antitrust. Itd be a bit risky but thats how you make dinero sometimes.

It's really bad news. It didn't go down as much as I expected.

Damn I got hit in the baba nuts

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Trump signed the stimulus bill. Good, I didn't want to see a big decline just yet.

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Nanis23 posted...

Is Baba a good buy now or a dangerous falling knife

And nooow?

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Getting crushed in BAND!

Tim Apple

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Whats up with ARKG?

Sunroof posted...

Whats up with ARKG?

After the run it's been on, a pullback is normal.

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I sold Visa for $1,950 gain and ARKG for $3,200 loss. I want to make room for EVRI in hopes that it keeps going down.

I am still in BAND, currently down around $2,100. I hav $75k to play with though so I am open to recommendations!

What is ARKG? is it ARKK but leveraged x3?

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Nanis23 posted...

What is ARKG? is it ARKK but leveraged x3?

It's going to be my like 25% of my portfolio in 2021 I can tell you that.

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Nanis23 posted...

What is ARKG? is it ARKK but leveraged x3?

I think ARKG focuses on genomics, while ARKK is their general fund. In general, levered ETFs are usually a bad idea because they tend to lose ground over time compared to the underlying non-leveraged thing they are tracking. This year SPY is up 14% while SPXL, which is supposed to do 3x SPY, is up.....4%. This year was kind of extreme for chaos, which hurts leveraged ETFs, but still, it's pretty illustrative of the problem.


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Kicking myself for not selling more ABNB at $171. And then not selling when it got back to $163. And then not selling when it got back to $153. Down to $148 now. Happy with rest of portfolio but I was thinking ABNB would probably hit a top for now for a few days now and was greedy hoping it would get back to where it was so I could sell, so I have some regret on this. Should have sold if I thought it was going down, even if it was a bit below where it was.

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Ive been whomping lately. Currently down $3k in Bandwidth but Im holding. Meant to get into EVRI last night but missed the bell and it went up 3% today.