One of the most difficult things about trading (at least for me) is timing. As someone focused on fundies, the beginning of my trading life was populated with consistent failure. My assumption was that if I can figure this out then someone else will figure it out tomorrow, so I damn well better get the trade on. I don’t need to tell you how that all worked out.

I am still not very good at the timing bit. I get better as I continue to learn from all the folks on this site. I am not sure I ever will be top notch as my brain is just wired the wrong way. Luckily, there are enough events like AMSC that come along to salvage things and keep me moving in the right direction.

My point is that just because you have a stinky chew toy proving the crime does not mean the dog is thrown on the chain today, tomorrow, next week or next year. AMSC showed stress years ago, even before the Citronellas first set sights on it, and it only cracked this week. You need to find a process that merges the two.

There are myriad ways to chase timing. I look for events that unexpectedly change investor views as expressed within Consensus estimates. Someone else I know says he uses “technicals” to time his trades, but there is not a single chart involved. Everybody has their methods. The one surefire way to have your ass handed to you is to time trades only on when you get a chance to read a balance sheet. Trust me. I am pretty good at telling what direction a balance sheet will go even before it is published, and that means someone much smarter than me is already there.

AMSC was on a list of near a hundred stocks I watch pretty closely. When highlighted I dug into the thing. I honestly had thought of AMSC only in passing over the past year or so in deference to the stock’s inability to trade in-line with fundies. Other stocks like this have popped up where I do the dirty deed and either buy it or short it…and nothing happens at all…or I lose everything I put into the option. Other times I do my thang and decide to pass on the idea, and then the stock rips higher or lower on my event.

I have my own fucked up process that makes consistent money for me. I do it largely by hand, which sometimes means manually feeding a long unattended Excel model for a day or two because automated data sources still suck. That process does not involve examining every fundamental a company exhibits, and a good portion of the time the balance sheet is not involved in my determination of whether a company will shit the bed or rocket higher in the next few months. I can burp three tickers right now that have yet to blow up but exhibit the same “stressful” balance sheet characteristics shown by AMSC.

I lay all this out on criticism for an incomplete analysis. Fair enough, I did not highlight every little crumb of info pointing at stress within AMSC. But understand that when I am done with AMSC (and I am not done yet), I will be on to the next one that pops up for me. It might be a stock in the chip space, or auto, or semicap, or ag processing, or solar, or utilities, or wind.

Get your game on if you want to quickly cover these spaces when an idea hits you between the eyes.

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