Pro Picks from the PPT Community

Too many good trades to mention!

Instead of going fishing at the beach, I went fishing into The PPT‘s notes page (picture above. click to preview) and found some great calls by The PPT Community.  I’ve been a part of many trader-communities, and I can honestly say The PPT group has a very high trader IQ.  Motley Fool CAPS forums is fool of fools, I mean new traders.  Yahoo Message Board… well, you know how toxic and immature that place is.  Scottrade Community has too many panties, or traders stuck in the year 2007 stocks. StockTwits is great for day-traders, but you can get lost in swing calls.

Here is a sample of some top calls from The PPT Community in the past few weeks.  I’ll be keeping an eye out for more picks this week 😉

Long HA – iWin. 3/10, out  4/17  

This stock was surely a winner as airline stocks took flight for an insane squeeze.  Awesome play iWin.

 

Long PCX – TheFly

What made this trade great was Fly’s sector wide call on commodities, in particular energy.  I was leaning bearish on energy, but man did that squeeze prove me wrong!  I know Fly’s trade on this was “market timing”, but look at the “charting” and classic technical squeezes on PCX…

 

“Long COIN” – jsawyer 4/24 

jsawyer made a nice call on COIN which was consolidating for an extended time under a buck.  What impresses me most about this trade was his entry just before it exploded.  Those lotto tickets cost him .88 cents.

Long CLF – Fly, RedFrog, Nation81, VCUTrader

 Sorry no chart.   But congrats to these guys for playing this commodity stock, CLF, on rising volume.  Great swing play.

Long GMCR – Gio, jnuts

One of my most watched stock, and best trades so far this year.  What I liked about the GMCR trade was that I predicted it would hit the IBD100 and it did get way up there, and I also used The PPT fundamental scores to bet againstBarrons who were very bearish heading into earnings… oops for Barrons. 

Long CDNS – Fly in 4/22 @ 4.85, partial out at 5.46 5/1

What I like about Fly’s calls is that he uses fundamentals.  In picking CDNS as a long, he used correlation fundamentals, observing that CDNS relationship with TSM would help them greatly. 

 

Long RUTH – Ragin 4/23

Ragin gets the “pick of the month” award for April on his RUTH pick.  Talk about a wonderful squeeze.  Nothing but green bars and BOP and massive volume. 

Long SFLY – 3/17

I used fundamentals to make this call.  SFLY hit my radar a few years ago, so I’ve been watching its book value to determine when it would be cheap.  In The PPT I mentioned it to be a buy-out candidate once the big companies start using cash. 

Long NGAS- TheFly

Broker A’s current pick is this fast moving energy stock.  Again, although he’s not much of a chartist, look at all those bullish flag breakouts.

Most of these picks were from last week!  I think having a community of real traders can really upgrade your trading performance.  Even if you didn’t follow anyone into these trades, it’s nice to ask other traders what they think and to offer a stock tip yourself.

If you like StockTwits, following people’s trades, or “thinking out-loud” your trades, then The PPT‘s “Wall” is probably something you will find very useful.  For those of you subscribing to The PPT, I strongly suggest you participate in this feature.  You wil definitely make your money back and much more.

Basically, the Wall is the PTT’s composite brain power of all the members in The PPT.  I like to think of it as the central nervous system connected to “the brain”.  Those who use StockTwits will especially find using the Wall (community notes) easy to use.  You simply enter a ticker, then add a note.  The wall will then update notes chronologically to a public notes place and to your own notes page.  So, a few days later you can check up on your call and see if you were wrong or right… kind of like StockTwits.  Think of The PPT‘s Wall/Community Notes as a swing trader’s version of StockTwits (which is predominantly day trading notes).

Anyway, keep up the good work guys and girls!  Now go make some money.

-gio-

Comments »

Today’s tape was soooo boring, I decided to go ahead and give the 10-balls riddle a try.  Took me about 30 minutes to solve.  Slipping there.  I find exercising your mind with probability can help you with trading.  Well, we never go and calculate exact probabilities when we trade a stock, but we do have a pseudo-probability-version floating somewhere in the subconscious of our minds before we enter and exit a trade.  Kind of hard to explain.

This riddle was given to us by Joe Andra3’s hedge fund manager peer:

Riddle: You have 10 balls and they all look the same. One of the balls weighs either more or less than the other 9, but the other 9 are of equal weight. You have a scale and 3 chances to determine which ball is different from the rest. How so? The manager told me that this is a probability question. (Note:  it’s one of those old fashion justice-scales, the ones where you weigh one item against the other)

I solved it using brute force conditional statements.  Yay!  Hat tip to Dr. Incognito.  Every indented “if” is a new weigh, so I’m allowed 3 indentations.  Oh yeah, and “!=” is another way to write “not equal to”

Find Q, where Q = odd ball
Given 10 balls:  a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,j
Create 4 groups:

group1 = abc
group2 = def
group3 = ghi
group4 = j

// Step 1:  weigh abc vs def.  Gives us two scenarios…

if (abc = def)
{
//it’s in ghi OR it’s j; weigh 2 balls from group ghi
     if (g>i)  //it’s either g or i
     // weigh g or i with normal ball ‘a’
          { if g = a, then  Q = i
          if g != a, then Q = g
          }
     if (g=i) // it’s either h or j
          {  if (g=h) then Q = j
          }
     if (g!=h) then Q = i
}

if (abc < def)
{
     Q != j, ghi // rule out those hairy balls

     // weigh abc vs normal group ghi
     if (abc > ghi)  // then Q is heavy, and in group abc
     {
          if (a > b) then Q = a // heaviest ball
          if (a = b) then Q = c
          if (a < b) then Q = b

      if (abc < ghi) // then Q is light, and in group abc
          if (a < b) then Q = a
          if (a = b) then Q = c
          if (a > b) then Q = b // lightest ball

}

… tricky!  The trick was to find out if the odd-ball Q was either heavier or lighter.

Here’s Doc’s answer:

… have a good weekend.  I still haven’t solved to 2358=36 impossible riddle.

Comments »

Nothing like waking up to the smell of Green Mountain.  Woke up to see my GMCR longs are up huge!  +37%

Awesome report.  http://www.reuters.com/article/marketsNews/idAFBNG49076520090429?rpc=44 

I could have told you their K-cups growths are insane,which is neat bcuz I have’t even seen the product in Hawaii.

Right now I am t yping with ONE hand.  My shoulder is major bus-up.  I gotta go back to the doctor or the ortho, cuz this pain is ridiculous.  I’m bout to take the whole bottle of Naproxen already.

Hmmm, what can I type with one hand that won’t take too long…

If you liked my anti-Barrons GMCR play, check out PEET.  The PPT detects improving internals on this related peer company.

On my way to StarBux… gonna tip them big for losing all their customers to Green Mountain. Lol.

Comments »

Market is up about 2.5% after Fed announcement, while VIX only down -5%.  I would bet against the crowd if the VIX were down -10%, but it seems like it is stabilizing around 36 heading into the close so rally should give up gains.  VIX was as low as 35.37 today, so I will use that as my short entry point:  34.50 – 35.37.  Other than that, it feels like the rally is running low on fuel probably because we’ve been stuck in a neutral zone for the past week.  I’m slowly building a short bias into this uncertainty.

Then again, I like shorting into news rallies, so I’ll go ahead and bet against oil as we move into driving season. Shorted PDE after a light volume break above down trending 200 MA.  I will short the other half below it.

Leaders down on today’s Fed spike:  NFLX, GMCR

Oh wait a minute, market reversing into the close here.  Moves fast.

Comments »

😉

My good friend just won this competition Monster Worldwide was sponsoring (http://nfl.monster.com/).  I couldn’t believeit, but when I saw his video it made me laugh.  It’s weird seeing people you know on TV.  Just wanted to give him a shout-out for repping it for Hawaii. Onyx is a geek, well, we like to say genius.  Radford High baby!  He is Mr. Stats, although he was never good at algebra.  He gets…

NFL Kickoff: Act as backstage talent wrangler at the 2009 NFL Kickoff concert (Sept. 2009)

International Series: Participate in on-field introductions at a game in London (Oct. 2009)

NFL Thanksgiving: Serve as an on-field broadcast liaison for NFL Network’s Thanksgiving Game (Nov. 2009)

Pro Bowl: Select a play from the sidelines during the 2010 Pro Bowl (Jan. 2010)

Super Bowl: Join the coin toss ceremony at Super Bowl XLIV (Feb. 2010)

$100,000

“Admittedly, we are a bit football deprived here in Hawaii, but that has never diminished my love for the sport of football,” said Herrera. “I seriously do have ‘fandemoniumfever’ – that intense passion and drive for the game. Put simply, being selected the Director of Fandemonium is a dream job for me – one I’ve been ‘training’ for since I was a kid.” 

I’m glad they picked him, he’s one of the funniest guys I know.  Plus he helped me out big time on my history term paper in high school.  See, I told you you would be paid back!

This is pretty exciting for me.  I’ll see if he can give “theHawaiiTrader” and iBC a shout-out on TV.  Lol. 

Are all these campaigning helping Monster Worldwide?  Looks like it so far…

For those on The PPT, I added some stocks to watch on my list.  There’s been a few good new leaders out there, and a few worth shorting.  For example, be sure to keep JJSF on your radar.  And STAR has been amazing (you can play the day-trade pullbacks, but go swing long on profit-taking).

Comments »

So this is how it feels.  Feels good to make some calls again.  I haven’t found any news as to why ZNH got slammed today.  Maybe some of the investors read iBC?  I didn’t have any time to cover any shorts because I was at the ER last night, had to bring in a friend- got home at 3am, and woke up about 10 mins ago (10am Hawaii Time).  Anyway, flight ZNH still has some way to go down.  I figure I have at least a 5% buffer to work with.  Why am I willing to sacrifice 5%?   Just look at the volume in the past 4 weeks, it’s quite pathetic.

This is the second time I went to the hospital for two different people this week.  Now it’s my turn to go see the doctor.  My shoulder is “all bus”.  “All bus” is a term we use here to mean “messed up.”  It originally was used to describe someone who is drunk.  But now it can refer to anything- your face looks all-bus; like me bus-your-face?  Why “bus”?  Because we can’t really spell in Hawaii, or maybe they were too high or drunk to pronounce the “t”.  Actually, although that maybe true, the word “bus” refers to our public transportation system TheBus.  What was I originally talking about?  Oh yeah, Chinese stocks… ZNH is all-bus.

Added to the longs list (with current PPT score):  JJSF (3.09), EEFT (no score), ARST (2.70)

Comments »