Origin XT Blog

I get spammed twice whenever I submit an entry here. Does any of you have the same problem?

I was unfortunately caught in the market downtime because I was at first skeptical that the market can so suddenly drop, so I left my stocks alone at first. Unfortunately, by the time I checked later at school, my stocks have already dropped a good deal. My only big loser was the stock of a mining company (let’s say M), whereas the rest of them had a forgivable loss totaling less than 1000.

Mr. Woo told me about the successes he has had with M, and he said it’s a growth stock. He said he’s keeping his, so on the first sign of a dip yesterday, I bought it. Unfortunately, for that day, it didn’t move up very much after I had bought it. And this morning, when I saw it was DOWN 3%, I dismissed it as a temporary fluctuation, and left for school. By the time lunch had arrived, I had already lost almost 3000 off this stock, and I decided to cut my losses for everything by selling them all.

20 minutes later, Dell came in for some odd reason. The log out function in Investopedia must not always work, apparently. I got rid of Dell too when I saw it.

I guess the 420ish drop in the DOW is not as bad as the 24.39% drop on Saturday, December 12, 1914. That would’ve been bad.

Now there is a new category made exclusively for stocks

In January I ordered the Math-78 textbook and Crime & Punishment from Amazon, chose the 5-10 day shipping, and hoped the books would arrive by the time I needed them. (M78 for the first quiz and C&P before the first “reading check”) The cost was immediately deducted after I got the confirmation email, too.

To date, I have received neither of them, and to my knowledge it’s been around a month since I’ve placed the order. I have received no notifications, emails, updates from the sellers as to why the shipment is 20-25 days overdue (and still not here), and I’m greatly displeased with the lack of “checks” Amazon places on its sellers.

Last semester, I didn’t get Candide or 1984 until the week before summer ended so there was no possible way in hell I had enough time to spend on the books as I wanted to (those two were definitely much better than TA and Asher, so it’s quite a shame). I thought it was a one-time deal–until then, I’ve never had similar problems with Amazon–but apparently it’s quite common. It seems like all the books I cared to (or wanted to) read never arrived on time, leaving me with the crap books from Borders (TA and Asher, for example). 1984 would have been a good slow read, and Candide would have been a good source of entertainment many times over (something that I can re-read), too.

Of what we’ve read so far and what we’re going to read, C&P is probably one of the better ones; Brave New World? Blah, too unrealistic. Oedipus? Too pointless. Hamlet? Well, not bad, but that’s expected of a Shakespearean classic. Heart of Darkness? Get to the point already, Conrad! The Stranger? Worst piece of crap I’ve ever read in my Senior year. But Crime and Punishment sounded interesting–the investigation of the mind of a self-congratulating murderer who thinks he is handsome and too good to work. And unfortunately it’s also the book I never got, so I’m stuck with reading (or not reading) the crappier version I pirated off the net, translated by Garnett. Speaking of Internet version e-books, the producers really need to figure out how to work encodings. Some characters don’t render.

I got Pride and Prejudice though, so I’m hoping for something good in contrast to the not-so-inspiring stack of literature (if you call The Stranger literature) we’ve read.

EDIT: I got a response to one of my complaints:

Hello,

Your book was purchased on February 1 and was mailed on February 2 by USPS. It usually takes 4 - 14 days for the delivery of standard mail. I don’t know what has happened. We will get another one out to you on Monday, February 26.

Thanks

Gee, thanks for telling me this after the book’s use is over.

http://finance.google.com/finance?q=BVSN

It’s pretty funny that at one point this stock was 840 dollars. And it dropped as low as 0.3 dollars in 2005 before recovering to a mildly decent 1.x. Does anyone think there’s a chance this might increase to 840 again?

Jinghao: Sūn Wùkōng (孙悟空)
Duke: That your name in chinese?
Jinghao: Hell no. That’s the Monkey King
Duke: king…kong..?
Jinghao: No
Duke: Abu?
Jinghao: George Bush
Duke: Oh, him

Not because its chips are the best mass-produced consumer computer processors, not because it is the biggest manufacturing company in the Silicon Valley, not because it is one of my most favorite companies, but because its stock results don’t reflect reality.

I bought Intel when it dropped below 21 (I got it at 20.91, I think) on Friday, after the huge tumble down thanks to unfavorable oil price fluctuations. I was pretty confident 21 is pretty much as low as it can go, with such a bright future ahead of it: AMD’s losing market-share, nVidia’s inevitable obsoleteness (as Intel rolls out chips that eliminate the need for an independent graphics core), and its new Metal-K technology combined with 45nm wafer-etching abilities. It probably can go higher in the next few days, but the immediate result is abysmal.

In the morning today, Intel announced a teraflop capable processor that runs at 62 Watts! That basically allows any willing consumer to purchase a supercomputer that uses half the power normal desktop chips use (If you were to get a supercomputer network this fast, you would need a huge room full of processors). This could replace whole datacenters with a pair of servers running these chips, and reduce power usage by data networks by 98%. Intel stocks inched up a bit from the opening price, and strangely, tanked after that.

This is what doesn’t make sense to me–here, the company unveiled the most powerful chip and the most ambitious invasion tactic to date, but the stocks tumble on the positive news. What’s going on? If stocks were more predictable than typical brownian motion maybe I wouldn’t be jumping all over the place. Do you have any major experiences with inexplicably illogical stock movements?

Mr. Wen called on me to answer #1 of the multiple choice, which asked about the tone of the poem. I replied that I didn’t know (that was the one I was least sure of), and he retorted that I should tap into my “deep reservoir of emotion.” And incidentally everyone started laughing. So, here are the results from a post-event investigation:

Me: Where is that deep reservoir of emotion?

Monica S: Behind the rocky slopes of the jinghao mountains, so only a trickle of emotion ever gets out. And even then, it evaporates. *poof* XD

Kat: It is a puddle that will accumulate in due time, if the sun does not cause it to evaporate too quickly. But since it is feb and it is raining like a mofo, chances are looking up dear Jinghao.

Both of ‘em mention the evaporation idea. So what supply I still have is diminishing :P. Darn you, Kinetic-Molecular Theory!

In response to a letter a TIME reader sent to TIME in response to the “Dawn of a New Dynasty” edition (which I never got):

“The Chinese Century” convinced me that by buying products made in China I am supporting that country’s political nonintervention policies in areas like Darfur and helping perpetuate a disgusting lack of regard for the value of human life. From now on, I am going to focus on buying American-made products.”

Janet Thurston
Brighton, Michigan

Your response convinced me that by buying products made in America I am supporting this country’s political and military intervention policies in areas like Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, and Kosovo and helping perpetuate a disgusting lack of regard for the value of human life (think Iraq war and the tens of thousands killed). From now on, I am going to focus on buying whatever products satisfy me best.

With what hypocrisy and audacity you mutter! Go take a deeper look at all which the US has involved itself with, and the hypocritical and judgmental attitudes with which it views China and the rest of the world. Iraq? That’s a total mess. If you think China’s “human rights abuses” (apparently they think massacring dogs with rabies is a human rights violation. What the hell?) were bad, look at the devastation in Vietnam, Iraq. After submitting a 600-billion-dollar plus military budget for 2007, the US has the nerve to criticize China’s 40 billion dollar budget, which is spread over a population five times larger than that of the US. Hey, China brought 500 million people out of poverty in the past 30 years; what did the US do? Pop out more babies into poverty? That’s right: poverty rate increased, with vital funds being drained by an unnecessary international intervention effort.

Regardless, I don’t think commercial interests should be tied to politics. As the consumer, I just want the best items from the cheapest places; and as a prospective employer, I just want the best and least expensive labor I can get.

So far, I have made $500+ off Intel, $600+ off nVidia, $400+ off TiVo, $250 off IBM, $300 off Xilinx (my mom’s company), $50 off China Life Insurance (I sold it because it was too risky), $950 combined off China Mobile and VFC, and $50 off Marvell. Those stocks consist of 9/10th of my stock history, and all nine of them have returned a decent profit–pretty good for an extremely cautious and conservative investor such as myself. They total to around $3100 bucks, or 3.1% above the starting cash of 100k. That’s pretty good; momentarily, those profits put me in 1st place in my class (period five).

I suppose you’ve noticed I’ve listed 9 stocks of my 10 that have profited me in an acceptable manner, but have left out the last one. That is the one I want to discuss mainly here: EVCC. Before you accuse me of simply and blindly jumping onto the EVCC bandwagon that propelled many to the top 5, I will tell you that this purchase (4000 EVCC stocks at the onset) was part of a calculated profit plan that should have reaped $950-$1000 a day or so, but instead, because of a malfunctioning limit-sell function of Investopedia, I am down $5000 (down $6000 if you include the potential profit) because of it.

What was the plan, you ask? Well, I noticed that EVCC was highly fluctuating, changing as much as 20% a day, and then back, so I realized I could profit immensely from the limit buy and limit sell functions, setting Investopedia to purchase at price x, then sell at price x+y immediately when that happens. The plan would have worked perfectly if Investopedia had worked.

How did I execute the plan? I set up a limit-buy on Monday for 4000 EVCC shares at $4.5 per share, which Investopedia purchased yesterday morning at $4.45. I also had a limit-sell at $4.64 per share, so that I can reap an immense amount of profits from the hourly fluctuations. When I checked back half an hour later, I saw that the EVCC stocks were at $4.69 per share, and I was quite elated, too, because that meant I would have gotten more than I had expected. I would have gained $960 ($920 after minusing 20 dollar commission each way) from the transaction, from that single fluctuation alone.

But when I checked the stocks at lunch, instead of seeing them sold by Investopedia (the limit sell requirements have been met! I even saw the data loaded onto Investopedia!), their values plummeted 13% or so. Although this had dropped me from the momentary high to 31st rank, I decided to keep them, not knowing what to do. Unfortunately, they plummeted again today–this time by $3000 in total value–dropping me to rank 159.

Oh yes, someone logged in as me and made market transactions at 12:49 PM Pacific time (3:49PM Eastern)–when I am in class–and screwed around with my EVCC stocks, causing me an additional 500 dollar loss, but that is insignificant amid this insane $6000 loss from one stock. I’ve changed my password, by the way, although I was sure that I had pressed the log-out button every time I checked my stocks at school.

So instead of being at 103850, I am at 973xx. This sucks. Damn you Investopedia! Good thing this is “fake” money, though, and I did pretty well on the test. Still, this 6000 dollar loss is undeserved; I cannot blame myself for Investopedia not following through with the limit-sell.