Origin XT Blog

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

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?

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?

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.

I’ve fluctuated between 99800 and 100950 or so in the past two days in the simulated stock game. I bought Intel when it was supposedly down, but because I bought after the market closed–which I must, because school ends after the market closes–I was subjected to the mercy of the market. And I lost. The next day, the price began at a pretty insane high and dropped back to the same place, but because I placed my order the night before, Investopedia made the purchase the second the market opened.

But off that note, the recent financial announcements from Google, Nintendo, IBM, AMD, Intel etc and the resulting stock-price changes in some of the world’s most-known companies did not make sense.

Google, which announced that its quarterly profit tripled to 1.03 billion or so dollars, saw its shares drop 20 points, or 4%.

Nintendo, whose Wii propelled its profits to a record 1.1 billion dollars for the nine-months ending Dec 2006, saw its shares decline 2%

AMD, devastated by a miserable 500+ million dollar quarterly loss and a losing market-share (to Intel), saw its shares climb 2%.

IBM, which earned 3.54 billion dollars last quarter after a staggering 25% growth, saw its shares tank 5% (4.51 dollars)

Intel, whose new announcements of the 45 nm chip and Metal-K technology combined with its regaining market share and marketing momentum led Wall Street to declare it the winner in microchip corporations, saw its shares decline 3% before rebounding slightly.

I wish stocks were more logical.