Tools For the Trade

A very important subject that is rarely discussed on the financial bloggery section of the internets is “what tools does one procure to help one become a successful investor?” I have very strong opinions on the matter, which are much different than most vain operators our there.

For example: having more than one screen is ridiculous, redundant and stupid. Why do I need to look at 10 different screens to buy and sell stocks? I’m not an air-traffic controller and I don’t help schmucks travel to space. If I was a market maker, then yes, I’d like to have more than one screen. But for the purposes of trading XYZ, one screen is all that I need.

For the record, I have a singular 27 inch monitor, an Apple laptop, an iPad and an iPhone, alongside two printers (color and jet) with music and CNBC running all day. I wake up at 6:48 every day and listen to Bloomberg radio, hosted by the awesome Tom Keene, from my Tunein Radio iPhone app and 1130 AM from the olde automobile radio.

At night, CNBC Europe is a must watch, truly different from the gossipy nature of CNBC America.

I  used to have a bloomberg terminal, but I didn’t find it to be worth the expense.

I have my trading platform, provided by my clearing firm, for trades.

For news, I subscribe to Briefing.com and keep my Twitter screen running through Echofone app on my iPad all day.

My favorite iPhone apps, which I find invaluable, are StockTwits and Earningscast (conference calls). The StockTwits app, in my opinion, is one of the most underrated apps out there. I never use their desktop, but find the app to be terrific in filtering out the relevant/trending stocks for me.

For CNBC, believe it or not, I use a website for the stream. Naturally, I have a big teevee with it running all day, but that website I just referenced gets their signal about 5 seconds faster than my cable provider. I don’t know why or how, but it’s something to BEHOLD.

Aside from Twitter, I don’t read many blogs, just news sites. I am always reading news and research reports, which are sent to me from a variety of gents and firms.

I could not trade without The PPT and I’m not saying that to sell memberships. I built it for me, not for retail sales. The screens and the algorithms help me immensely. There are thousands of ways to use the tool, even I haven’t cracked all of its secrets.

12631, run and managed by ChessnWine and Ragin Cajun, is awesome, not only for the sage and flash picks from Chess and RC– but for the community aspect. There are hundreds of talented traders in there sharing ideas in real time. You cannot beat that. I wish something like 12631 was available to me when I started out in the business. I would have avoided blowing up a few times, without a doubt.

When mobile, I use the CNBC app for futures quotes and portfolio updates. It’s real time, free, and stable. There isn’t a better finance app out there to serve those ends.

On the desktop, aside from my trading platform, a good site to get fair value futures is this one. By the way, I also run a variety of data, included futures, post fair value, 321 crack spreads, WTI-Brent crude spreads, sovereign bond yields, at the top of iBankCoin, which is expandable too.

Oh, I almost forgot the olde telephone. I use that a lot too, talking to friends and enemies alike. I get plenty of text messages too, men in white robes offering “The Fly” sage stock advice through mobile means.

And that’s it.

If you’re going to take this business serious, you need the hardware, software and the know-how to procure and interpret information. Twitter has become a powerhouse for finance and news; you just need to know who to follow.

Sometimes too much information hurts through over-saturation.  When there’s too many options on a food menu, I tend to get bored and order a grilled chicken gyro by default. Block out the waste and the retarded. Discard them. The Yahoo message boards can be useful, as well as Investor Village. But understand the majority of the people posting there know less about finance than a lower class gent from Chicago knows about decorum.

Invest in yourself and make sacrifices to the stock Gods, then wish for good fortune.

I had just started iBankCoin 2 months prior to the meltdown. You can say iBC was born in the fires of the country, as its financial apparatus crumbled to a cinder. My business was humming along, but I suffered egregious losses towards the end of 2007. If you recall, the market soared to new highs after the Bear Sterns scare in the summer of 2007. I remember being in Lake George, NY–watching the carnage from a low speed internet connection. I even blogged about it, something to do with Important Matters of Mountain Vacations or something.

I knew, with every fabric of my being that the market was in serious risk of going lower. For awhile, I played the game and traded the long side, just to keep my ax sharp and my knife bloody. Moreover, the general consensus of all tabbed bloggers was for a lower, much lower, stocked market. I believe I penned my first bearish piece on 8/14, following Cramer’s retard attack on CNBC.

Oct ’07-Feb ’08

So I had these big short positions in December of 2007 and I was down large. The odd part about those underwater double inverse (triple inverse wasn’t invented yet) positions was that I didn’t have a care in the world about them. I had conviction.

January of ’08 came and hit the market like a bag of rocks upon the heads of disabled old men in wheeled chairs. I cleaned house. I was on my way to making a fortune.

I’m not sure if you know it or not, but Cronkite (the news guy on iBC) and I used to work together. Despite his interests in space rockets and Kennedy conspiracy theories, he has a really good grasp on the general market trends. We’d go over the internals every morning and afternoon, almost in shock by the absoluteness of the decline. But we’re both gentlemen of the first order and always maintained a certain cool demeanor through it all–naturally. I recall the market crashing, literally, and at the same time feeling depressed about the turn of events, despite being 250% short (leverage). I was thinking ahead and felt that the money I was earning by betting against banks and everything else was going to be pointless. It was to be a giant exercise in futility if our way of life collapsed. Clients would lose their jobs and take all of their money back, providing the dollar was still relevant.

Cronkite and I would marvel at blue chip stocks trading in the low single digits, saying “this has to be a bottom or else we’re all going to die.” It felt like the end, especially at the bottom.

Food wasn’t going to be delivered because credit was on the verge of being a thing of the past–vapor lock. I showed a much more jovial face to the public, on iBankCoin, bragging about killing people on my way to work and snatching the purses from old ladies who were trying to cash their social security checks.

It was a dark time for the world and I profited from it. My book of business went to new highs. I stopped accepting new clients and told my small ones “to go play with a bag of marbles” and to leave me alone or else I’d kill them. I had work to do and it had to be done.

Then the government started to intervene, which made shorting stocks very, very dangerous. One day they banned all short selling in banks, because they could, which completely screwed over the inverse ETF racket. That same day, the market was down huge and SKF down 20% too. Go figure. There was a liquidity crunch in the ETF because it was illegal to short. People got mugged that day.

CNBC served as a propagandist network, on behalf of the federal government. They’d leak information to Charlie Gasparino, who’d time his rumor mongering at 3:30, just to cause a squeeze in the markets. It worked every single time and it was never fair.

It went something like this (no large marge).

The market once soared by over 900 points (that’s 11%!) on news that the government would bail everyone out. It was impossible to short the market, which is why the market bottomed out and went speed chopping carrots with balls on the table to the upside in 2009.

iBankCoin took off. Readers all made a King’s ransom and we all lived happily ever after–at least most of us did.

Sometimes I am grateful for the manipulation in the market (sometimes). I’d much rather stay my execution, than suffer from the firing squad now.

Long live Benjamin Bernanke.

I didn’t allocate any money, aside from a small purchase of HMC. I’ll wait until tomorrow to take a stab at the market. There’s some decent conviction in this market and tech is leading the way up. If AAPL could get going, the Nasdaq will take off.

I was going to buy ELLI on this dip, but opted to wait and see what sort of news materializes. Frankly, I am not in the market to buy dips. With the money that I’ve earmarked to invest, I want momentum.

XIV is probably going to be the best investment over the long term. You can’t go wrong betting against volatility. What a suckers bet going long the VIX.

I’m most bullish on Japan, holding both HMC and SNE. I believe TM is on the verge of conducting a “one hundred dollar roll” soon. Buy in now for a 6-10 point run.

Gold/silver bounced today, but the sector is utterly useless. There is no discernible edge going long any miner. They’re run by criminals with black teeth. Their workers are whipped with leather to work and kicked into holes 10,000 feet deep. If you are an idiot who believes in inflation, go buy GLD. I’d avoid any and all miners, not only because of the 16th century working conditions that persist in these middle earth hell holes, but because the stocks do not trade according to reason.

If we are to follow seasonal trends, the market is going up from here until tax day. However, I strongly suggest avoiding all earnings plays.

Facebook leads the way higher. All of a sudden, it is the top pick for Dan “ugly face” Niles, after being his top short. Every single person I know hates AAPL. They look at the iPhone and laugh at it, whilst texting perversion on their Samsung devices (traitors).

Early this morning, a Spanish bond auction went extremely well, solidifying the notion that the european crisis is over. If you think about all of the turmoil that continent endured, GDP growth can only get better in 2013, under a much more benign economic environment.

There are some big movers in the market today, like BBY, MY, NOK, YELP and VOXX–but it’s only a 65% breadth day. There is room for improvement here.

I’m bullish and will be allocating 20% of my cash today.

Cash

VHC

HMC

JRCC

NAV

SNE

RS

KMB

CHD

FB

I added to my HMC position.

Disclaimer: If you buy HMC because of this post, the next time you are driving on the highway, your brakes will stop working. And, you may lose money.

I’ve been honing in on companies who suck milk from the government tit. Wouldn’t you rather own a business dependent on a stark mad, out of control, government, rather than a populous subject to instant-firing and subsequent impoverished state?

Thus far, I’ve identified the following names as beneficiaries to the larges of government.

PRSC

The Providence Service Corporation provides and manages government sponsored social services and non-emergency transportation services. It offers home and community based counseling services, which include home based and intensive home based counseling, substance abuse treatment services, school support services, correctional services, and workforce development; and foster care and therapeutic foster care services. The company also provides not-for-profit managed services comprising administrative support, information technology, and accounting and payroll services; intake, assessment, and referral services; monitoring services; and case management services. In addition, the company provides non-emergency transportation management services to state Medicaid programs, local government agencies, hospital systems, health maintenance organizations, private managed care organizations, and commercial insurers, as well as to individuals with limited mobility, people with limited means of transportation, people with disabilities, and Medicaid members. Further, it offers school transportation services to school children, including special needs students who are physically fragile or mentally ill. The company has operations primarily in the District of Columbia, United States; and British Columbia, Canada.

MMS
MAXIMUS, Inc. provides business process services to government health and human services agencies in the United States, Australia, Canada, Saudi Arabia, and the United Kingdom. It focuses on administering government-sponsored programs, such as Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), health care reform, welfare-to-work, Medicare, child support enforcement, and other government programs. The company operates in two segments, Health Services and Human Services. The Health Services segment offers business process and administrative support services, as well as consulting services for state, provincial, and federal programs, including Medicaid, CHIP, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, health care reform, Medicare, and Health Insurance British Columbia. This segment’s services include government health insurance program administration, health insurance program eligibility and enrollment, eligibility and enrollment modernization for government health benefit programs, health insurance exchange design and operations, application assistance and independent enrollment counseling, premium payment processing and administration, objective and evidence-based health appeals, independent medical reviews, health plan oversight, eHealth solutions with the Medigent product suite, Medicaid Management Information System planning and oversight, program consulting, and consumer outreach and education services. The Human Services segment provides various business process, case management, job training, and support services. This segment’s services comprise welfare-to-work services; child support case management, customer contact center operations, and program and systems consulting services; management tools and professional consulting services for education institutions; K-12 special education case management solutions; program consulting services; and tax credit and employer services

SWI
SolarWinds, Inc. designs, develops, markets, sells, and supports enterprise information technology (IT) infrastructure management software for IT professionals in various organizations in the United States and internationally. The company offers enterprise-class IT management products, including Network Performance Monitor, a server-based fault and performance management platform to minimize network downtime; Network Performance Monitor modules, a series of add-ons; network configuration manager to automate the processes of network device discovery, network inventory management, and network change management; user device tracker, a server-based switch port management tool; scalability engines to increase the scale of a number of the products; and enterprise operations console to provide web-based views of various instances of Network Performance Monitor modules and Application Performance Monitor. Its enterprise-class network and IT management products also comprise Application Performance Monitor, a server-based availability and performance management system for applications and server infrastructure; patch manager to automate the process of deploying, managing, and reporting on patches and configuration settings; and synthetic end user monitor to capture the user steps of any web application and monitor the end-user experience; storage manager that combines reporting, monitoring, and notification on the performance of storage resources; backup profiler to provide a consolidated view of the status of backup operations; virtualization manager to manage various aspects of virtual server infrastructure; and log and event manager to automate the collection and interpretation of logs. In addition, the company provides free tools, such as desktop, laptop, server-based, or internet-based applications; and tools and toolsets for specific solutions of routine and complicated tasks.

GMK
Gruma, S.A.B. de C.V., through its subsidiaries, engages in the production and sale of corn flour, wheat flour, tortillas, and other related products. Its products include rice, oats, packaged tortillas, grits, snacks, hearts of palm, tortilla chips, corn chips, and potato chips, as well as flatbreads comprising pita, naan, chapatti, pizza bases, and piadina. The company also designs, manufactures, and sells machines for the production of tortillas and tortilla chips under the TORTEC and BATITEC names. Its brands include JUANA, TIA BERTA, DECASA, ROBIN HOOD, POLAR, MONICA, ROBIN HOOD, LASSIE, REPOSADA, PODEROSA, SELECTA, DEMASA, FLOR DE TRIGO, MISIÓN, MASECA, MISSION, GUERRERO, TORTIMASA, MASARICA, MINSA, TORTI RICA, TOSTY, RUMBA, and LA TICA. The company offers its products to independent distributors, supermarkets, wholesalers, bakeries, cookie and pasta manufacturers, small grocery stores, tortilla and tortilla chip manufacturers, snack manufacturers, mass merchandisers, independent stores, food processors, restaurants, food service distributors, schools, hospitals, and military, as well as to governmental social welfare and distribution programs. It operates in the United States, Mexico, Venezuela, Central America, Europe, Asia, and Oceania. The company was founded in 1949 and is headquartered in San Pedro Garza García, Mexico.

I am sure there are many more government lackey plays. If you happen to know any, feel free to share. In case you’re wondering what I am up to, it is to expand my current investment universe to include new names through traditional research. I’d also like to address the lack of comportment taking place in the comments section. Understand something and know your place. “The Fly” has made money every single year since he’s been blogging here, on an annual basis, and many years prior. I have an expansive track record and history in navigating the markets and do not shy away from the down times.

“The Fly” will rise up and drive rail spikes through the heads of his enemies. Just wait and see.

I’ve narrowed down my list of stocks that conform with certain growth and fundamental attributes that I favor.

Thus far, I am impressed with AMBA (they own the hi-def market for cameras) and ELLI, mixed on ULTI and ALXN.

Have a listen to the ELLI call and see for yourself. Housing is back and these guys are killing it.

Back to listening to calls.

On deck: BCEI, NCT, ECL, ERII, FLT, MWIV, RTEC, SNTS and SWI.

Minimum market caps of $5 billion, most up over past 3 months.

Winners

Losers

So Facebook is now leading the market higher, as AAPL makes new lows. Do you see how difficult that trade was to pull off? Just 3 months ago, AAPL was riding high and FB was wallowing in misery. The lesson to be learned here is nothing lasts forever and try to avoid following the herds, for they are wrong, more often than not.