A CNQ prequel and a bit of the Po Pimp story…

I’m gonna come correct on my views of CNQ.  Overall it’s been my biggest money maker ever percentage wise.  Everybody has their first home run, CNQ is mine.  Bear with me as I tell a little story.  Tomorrow or the next day will be the official CNQ analysis post, but I want to get this out there first.

Back in 2003, the Pimp was going through some hard times.  Recent divorce damn near wiped my ass out, eyeball deep in debt inherited from that fucking bitch of an ex-wife, you get the point.  Originally I had a plan to pay off all these bills over the next 3 years.  After about two months of that crap I decided I didn’t like being in debt so went all in on credit card payments.  For the next year I survived on absolute bare minimum and used every spare nickel to my name to pay off debt.  Once I was done paying that shit off, money started building up in my bank account quite nicely.

Enter March / April 2004 when things made a turn for the better.  Right before then, I got a new position in the company overseas where the company paid for my housing (i.e. no house note or rent payment to worry about).  My company proceeded to send me on a 6-week lovely assignment to beautiful Dhaka Bangladesh.  It’s as nice as you can imagine a typical third world Asian shit hole being.  But the good thing is I was 100% on the company dime the entire time.  I did not spend a cent of my own money for a month and a half.  During this period I also banked a very nice bonus check.  I never had this much money in my bank account before so I thought I was rich.  Things were great. 

At the same time another engineer in my company came through Bangladesh and left behind a copy of Wired magazine of all things.  Don’t know why, but instead of tossing it in the trash I read the thing.  There was a very interesting article about oil sands and the companies that stood to profit from them.  This is right before the huge run in oil prices, but those of us in the industry could feel something was about to happen.  Everybody was getting busy as fuck.

In the magazine article they went into quite some detail about Canadian Natural Resources and their upcoming oil sands development.  When my assignment in Bangladesh was over, I looked up Canadian Natural on the innernets and thought it sounded like a good investment.  At this point in my life I didn’t even have a trading account and never bought a stock other than what was done in my 401-k. 

I decided what the hell, and put the money I saved while working in Dhaka plus the bonus check all into CNQ at about $25 / share.  Since I knew fuck all about the stock market this was a “buy and hold” all the way.  I rode this bitch through two 2 for 1 splits and cashed out in the high 90’s back before the meltdown.  In sum over four years I had a 1,400% return.  So indeud, CNQ holds a special place in my “trading career”.

Since then I’ve made some more profits with CNQ both long and short.  I’ve had some very small losses as well, but in the end CNQ has been the best stock ever for me.  I apologize for the personal stuff, but it might be good to have a bit of perspective when you read the upcoming analysis post.