is happily being the wheel rather than a rusty old spoke
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test again
test
test
Actually, what you're wanting (them not showing up in your Inbox) is on the to-do list. But not in the way you're talking about.
I'm never going to make it so that putting someone on ignore means they can't reply to one of your posts. It's one thing for a moderator to ban a user from a premium board, but quite another to let anyone use the Ignore button to interfere with another person's posting ability.
What I'll be doing is adding a routine to post-submission so that if they're writing it to someone who has them on their ignore list, it'll simply mark the message as having been read so it won't show up in their inbox.
If not for how horribly I wrote the Preview/Spellcheck routine, I could implement this in about 30 seconds. As it is, it has to wait until I rewrite the whole Post/Preview/Edit/Submit/Update set of routines to work the way they do on SI.
Currently you can block someone you don't see unwanted posts, but that doesn't block them from "replying to" one of your posts?
You mean via PM, right? If so, that's on the long-term to-do list.
I'll call your side note and raise it.
SANM started the morning with a pretty nice climb so I yanked my stop-loss and kept the order entry window open ready to lighten up.
When I went to take a shower, it was trading above $5.50 and looked inclined to stay there or slowly climb.
I came back to find it in the $5.20's and it had apparently hit a low of $4.64. I can't tell what happened still. A huge volume spike. Can't tell if it was one huge order that'd gotten filled way below the bid or what.
I bought an additional 10% position at $5.25, and have a limit order in to sell that chunk at $5.45, which I'm not sure will happen. Oh. Happened while I was typing this.
Will be interesting to see at the end of the day if I should've sold all of it at $5.45 or sold none of it. It's very surprising to see it currently up a little bit despite the fact that the markets are getting creamed. The Nas isn't down as much as the DJIA, but usually if the Nas is down, especially this much, SANM's down quite a bit.
If it can largely stay in this range with the Nas being this weak, I might increase my longer-term position if I can get some more in the $5.30's.
Okay, I've killed all traces of the old search system. There might be timeouts tonight, but in the morning I'd appreciate it if anyone lets me know if they encounter slowness, weirdness, or timeouts in searches. And especially if any searches are broken in case I missed one. Had forgotten how many different ones there were.
Private Message searches will be MUCH faster than they were before, but they're still not gonna be as snappy as public message (current year) searches. There are a lot of PM's here.
Sure hope I'm finally DONE with this project!!!
Yeah, they will, but it should be getting better. CPU utilization is dropping down steadily. The PM Search catalog is only about 15% done right now.
I'm gonna go kill change tracking and the catalog on the regular message table now. It should have a minor effect but since message inserts/updates are so infrequent this time of night, I'm sure it's not really costing a lot of overhead.
Should be working now. Thanks. Turned out I had the same problem in author-searching.
The catalog is building on the new Private Message search table, and I'm getting ready to zap the message-table catalog. Should save us some overhead and increase search speed even more and, hopefully, make them closer to realtime (crossing fingers).
The site's gonna have intermittent slowness and timeouts for about the next 4 hours. And results in private searches will slowly get up-to-date.
"Search this Member's Posts" now working. Yep. Fast!!!
"Search this board" now working under the new system. And it's FAST!
Private Message Search table is currently populating, which is why the site is so slow. I've run variations of this proc about half a dozen times and every darned time I fire it off, I forget that I need to add the "with (nolock)" hint to make it run faster and go easier on the system! Dangit! But should be its final run.
Public Msgs search from the top of the screen is running on the new system now and it is FAST!!! The only thing currently running fast, though.
This time I'll try to give some advance warning for a change.
I'm working on Private Msg Search tonight and I'm going to frequently have the database server so swamped the site will slow down or experience timeouts.
I was thinking I'd heard that Ford had acquired a large(r?) stake in Cummins in anticipation of switching to their engines.
Around these parts, even among Ford fans, the Cummins is considered the superior engine.
I would've bought a Dodge specifically for that engine, but at the time I bought my truck, Dodge didn't make a crew cab super-duty and the Chevy's diesel was a disgrace.
Added to my watchlist.
Without looking it up, isn't this the company that makes the diesel engines used in Ford Super-Duty pickups (as well as other trucks)?
Isn't Ford switching to Cummins before too long?
If so, is this loss of marketshare already priced in?
Not sure in which way it'd be a technical guy's dream. You mean using TA to catch the many opportunities it's given to spit out money both long and short?
Susie, I don't know enough about TA to really recommend any sources. I've never had the time to learn it and instead read (with both eyes wide open) anyone who does know their TA and is discussing a stock I'm interested in.
There are only 3 things I know about technical analysis:
1. Constricted Bollinger Bands are amazingly consistent about producing a large price movement (though, as I've pointed out earlier, they do not predict the direction of the move).
2. Trends tend to continue to following their same course until they defy the trend strongly on heavy volume.
3. Moving averages are your friend. Personally, I like to look at the 50, 100, and 200DMA's, and if a stock behaves the same way nearly every time it ends up in the vicinity of any of them, I count it as a point in my contempted trade's favor, believe it'll be likely to repeat history if it's near one of them. For example, if a stock repeatedly backs off when approaching the 200DMA (as SANM has done consistently this year), I am very inclined to short it at the 200DMA.
Edit: Since an important tenet of mine in the market is that history tends to repeat itself, I just looked at the 50DMA on SANM and changed my mind about what I believe is going to happen. It looks like if the B-bands do tighten, they'll do so at a point where the 50DMA has typically turned upward, so I'm going to put it at more like a 75% chance of an upward break and only a 25% chance of a cliff-dive.
2 things to add along that same vein:
1. It still floors me that we buy and sell stocks almost exclusively based on the "bigger fool" theory. We don't buy them for dividends (well, I do in the IRA. I've got a lot of F there because of the dividend, small though it is). We buy them because we hope to someday someone dumber than us will buy them from us at a higher price. It used to be that you bought the stocks you thought would end up paying the best dividends, so you could earn money and as their dividend went up, so did their stock price, then you sold when you thought it'd topped out.
2. I used to work as an import auto mechanic. I used to vehemently refuse to work on American cars, and I'll never forget what my boss told me. He said "Bob, all cars are shit. American, Japanese, European: All shit. That's why we make such a good living."
He still didn't make me work on the American cars anyway. Though I have something like a dozen cars now with only one of them Japanese (Subaru WRX) and one of them Britsh (Austin Healey 3000 MkII), I'm a die-hard Ford man and POS or not, I love them. Plus, they're so much better now then when I was working as a mechanic.
Guess you didn't read the rest of my post. I already own it, as I said in the post when giving full disclosure.
Yep, that's a pretty ugly one-year isn't it. What do you think of the Bollinger Bands? They're heading toward pinching to an extent greater than they have anytime in the past 6 months. You do know what that means, right?
You will both be happy together
We definitely come from different perspectives as investors. I don't fall in love with a stock or have pipe dreams for it. I study it and if I don't already know its industry, I learn its industry. "Happy together" isn't a term that applies to me and any stock. A stock is just a vehicle by which to attempt to turn money into more money, with an eye toward (personally) looking for the best risk/reward ratio I can find.
Bob, I think SANM is a Piece of S#!+...
It might very well be, which is why I'm asking others to look at it and give their opinions. Thank you for yours. However, I think that might be a bit strong of a label to apply to a company that has billions of dollars of revenues per year and trades at a forward PE of of 10.5 and 81% of its shares at last count were held by institutions, although I suspect that figure is now closer to 70% with recent distribution.
Take a look At the Beautiful trend in the 1 yr chart.
Actually, an interesting element of the chart is that there *is* no trend in the 1-year. A trend is a steady slope in one direction or the other. That doesn't exist here. A good example is if you look at March 2nd. Low of the year there. What'd it do from there? Very rapidly tacked on better than a 10% gain, then has slowly retraced. As it gets closer to the $5.30 level it appears to have been at that day and as the B-bands constrict at the same time, you know what that means, right?
If you don't know what it means, when Bollinger Bands constrict to a tightness they haven't seen for 6 months, it's a very strong indicator that the stock is going to make a very dramatic move in one direction or the other. They don't predict the direction. Only that a very large move is very likely. For an example, pull up a 6-month chart with a B-band overlay and see what happened in late October when the bands got very constricted. 30% gain in about a week. And you can bet that as I saw the bands constricting, I was all over the stock. I remember it well. I was at the racetrack with a new two-car hauler I'd just bought and I remember watching the stock on my Treo and selling it and my calls at precisely the price that paid for the trailer.
The bands aren't that tight right now, though. But if it hangs out in the mid 5's for a few more trading days on the kind of volume it's been getting lately, the bands should really constrict.
When they do, it's a very safe bet that it's either going to lunge upwards about 20% or drive off a cliff without leaving skid marks. In the future, I plan to (if I can find the time) looks for stocks like this and get straddles when I see the bands tightening.
Keep in mind, too, that when I'm looking at a stock like this, I'm not looking to turn $1000 into $100,000. Lightning striking one ticker out of thousands is an exceedingly rare event even over the course of a decade. I look more toward building $100k into $105k, and so on. Slow and steady wins the raise. Provided you bet your money on the right tortoises.
You have a lot in common.
I've got a lot in common with a stock? As nonsensical as that statement is, it certainly does bring a lot of smart-alec retorts to mind, but I'll refrain. I'm here to talk stocks; not engage in personal attacks, so I'l bite a hole through my tongue. <g>
So, your considered opinion is that SANM is an ideal short? What kind of timeframe? You could very well be right. I've shorted it a couple of times and made money on both of those trades. I sold all of it (but kept the options) last week when it seemed to have gotten ahead of itself, but if I were really an astute investor (which I don't claim to be -- I'm just analytical and try to place appropriate "bets"), I'd have been smart enough not to not only sell it but to short it.
Care to make a prediction and see which of us called this one right? I think it's about 60% likely to be above $6 again sometime next week for a 10% gain, and 40% likely to be around $4.50 (for a roughly 15% gain from a short sale) in the same timeframe.
Of course it goes without saying (or *should*) that if it heads toward $4.50, I certainly won't be a shareholder on the way. I have a stop-loss order in to sell at $5.19. That's the most pain I'm willing to tolerate with it. I'm one of those kooks that things when you buy a stock, you need to immediately know at which price you plan to sell, both on the upside and downside, so you don't take losses deeper than you can handle and don't get greedy and turn a nice gain into a loss by holding too long.
So that's my take on it. I won't pound the table on it like I did ELN at $5.60 (where I actually went way past my 20% rule because it was such an obvious screaming buy) but my money is currently bet that it's more likely than not to be a $6 stock next week and past $7 at some point in April, which, if it happens would get me gains along the lines of 50% (keeping in mind the leverage options give you).
If the board doesn't mind, I'd be happy to post all of my buys and sells here, both short and long and my reasoning behind my decisions. I liked this board when that was the kind of posts it had rather than being a one-stock deal.
I think it could be helpful to others to not only see the kinds of trades I make and my reasoning for them, but how I manage my money by taking decent profits when I have them and cutting my losses when they've reached the highest level I'm willing to tolerate.
I know people tend to fear selling (selling is an infinitely more difficult decision than buying), and especially fear that if they sell, they'll have sold at the bottom, but I honestly can't remember ever selling at a loss and having it be the bottom. By the time I'm out, a *real* trend has been established and it just keeps going down.
So, if you were going to short SANM at $5.45, at what price would you cover? And at what price would you cut your losses?
No, we pay QuoteMedia a (rather steep for my blood) monthly fee for them. We pay a flat fee for the first million per month than extra for each million or part of a million we go past that. And we've gone past it a few times.
Yep. It was why I was so reluctant to even include them. We're a message board and I was content to let other places do quotes and lose money on them. I personally don't often use the quotes here, preferring the Yahoo ones since they have the very simple TA stuf I understand covered.
Since I believe I'm done with all the short-term changes to Advanced Search (Public) except for later adding a "Previous" link, and the market has been closed for a couple of hours, so I don't consider Advanced Search as "mission-critical" now, I'm going to kill the catalog, kill the search table, repopulate the search table, and rebuild the catalog.
In lay terms, this means Advanced Search for 2005 is going bye-bye for a while and for the next few hours is going to either throw errors or return no results.
Because the search program has no way of knowing whether it's a stock ticker you searched for or some other word, so we don't want it, for example, trying to retrieve a quote (which we have to pay for) for the symbol "zeev".
Everything looks fine to me.
I did just implement the code to deal with message deletes and restores in the search table, but they shouldn't cause any problems and the utilization histograms look exactly right for this time of day.
Thanks. I definitely consider myself "recovered" finally (after about 2 months of that nonsense). I feel 100% most of the time, though I did feel some of that detestable weakness and queasiness when I got home yesterday, but it was an especially stressful day as Monday's typically are. Was the first time I'd felt that at all in at least a week, so I'm in good shape now.
Because it amuses me more to laugh than to suggest? <g>
Seriously, the reason we don't give spelling suggestions is because that would be a terribly high-cost item in terms of hardware utilization. It's already *very* expensive to parse a post into its individual words, then step through each word to see if it exists in our 250k-word dictionary table.
When I think about it in terms of the actual work that's happening, especially in a post that has several hundred words, I can't comprehend that the equipment is able to do it at all, let alone do it as well (and quickly) as it does.
Kind of like watching a bumblebee fly when having just enough mechanical engineering knowledge to know bumblebees can't fly.
OUCH!
But I've felt your pain, though I've probably been completely in and out of it at least 3 times in that timeframe.
What pretty consistently happens with my core position is that I'll dump it at a peak (so I can end up owning more of it while keeping with my 20% rule) then buy about 1/4 of it back when I think it's come back down as far as it will, buy another 1/4 later when I think "Okay, I was wrong. *This* is the bottom.", then end up finding out I was wrong again later and buying the other 1/2.
And what's also consistent is that I'll be under water on it for a while, then inevitably be able to sell it for a profit if I just wait it out.
I bought the last 50% of my position yesterday at $5.66, so I'm underwater on it now too, even on my cheapest shares. Average price of current position is $5.82. If history repeats itself, it'll go down about another 30 cents to make sure I feel some pain, then slowly come back up to where I've got a 10% gain I can't resist pocketing.
Volume about 60% higher than normal today, but its volume does fluctuate quite a bit, so I don't usually read much into its volume. Though I know the folks who work solely based on TA sure can't be terribly bullish if it popped onto their radar by losing 1 1/2% on 60% higher than normal volume.
Edit: Though I really don't trade enough to keep much of an eye on anything intraday, I do keep a rather wary corner of my eye on this one because if it decides to tank for any reason (earnings warning, analyst downgrade), I see nothing in the way between here and zero.
We do have a spell-checker installed.
Was gonna say I might as well while I've got it open, but that one would require work in the message-parsing functions, so I'd better save that for when I can really be giving it my full attention.
Bad things happen when I play around with anything message-related and so much as sneeze while I'm doing it.
FWIW, I hadn't seen this post of yours before posting my own contribution there to help along those lines. Hopefully stocks that trade in dollar increments are fair game.
Don't worry. I know that neither you or I can say "I think this is a good company and everyone should buy it" or "Sell this POS!". I both rah-rah'd and bashed the stock I brought up.
I rarely post about stocks as I'm not a very active trader. Well, most would consider me "active", but I'm not a day-trader. I might do 2-3 trades per week. Recently making decent money trading ELN, but leaving on the table perhaps 10 times as much money as I ended up making from it. So I don't claim to be good at it.
I also am careful about what I say about stocks because I'm an executive and a programmer. Which means I don't necessarily know squat about stocks, but people might make the mistake of thinking that I do because of which sites I'm exec/geek for.
That said, let me throw a ticker out there I'd love to get some feedback on, positive and negative: SANM
On the basis of my rather limited understanding of technical analysis, this seems to me a rather risky play with potentially excellent returns. It's at $5.42 while I'm writing this. I can see it in the 8's by the time 2 more 10Q's come out (and have calls with which I hope to benefit from that happening) and the mid teens in a year if all goes well.
However, I can just as easily see this one completely tanking in no time, especially if the next Q is disappointing. I see no technical support at all except for what seems to me a base being built here in the mid-5's.
So, Eagle or Turkey?
Disclosure: I trade SANM both long and short and currently have an all-in (the 20% of trading portfolio size limit I allow myself on any stock) long position comprised of stock and April and July $7.50 calls and a few April $5.00 calls. I trade a portion of my stock position perhaps once a week or so to take advantage of tankage and peaks.
Edit: Wanted to add that I often will trade a little bit of this one as a sort of proxy for trading the Q's, as it is often pretty reliable about moving the same direction as the Nas, but at a multiple in terms of percentage movement.
I just put a new version of update_msg.asp into production.
Let me know if you encounter any kind of errors when editing a public message you've already posted.
I'm sitting here kinda scratching my head, too. You might recall an earlier reference to my too frequently forgetting to put in a WHERE clause.
My secretary ran back here several minutes ago because of how loudly I yelled "DAMMIT!!!"
In the development environment, I'd added code to update the search table right after updating the message table when you submit a post edit. And when I tested it and hit the "Update Msg" button and it spent a really long time just sitting there, I suspected an error then suddenly realized without even looking that I'd forgotten the WHERE clause.
What SHOULD have happened as a result (and perhaps will, but may be taking a very long time to happen) is all of the messages in the 2005 search table should've had their text replaced with "Edit test again".
No worries if it does. The search table is simply a mirror of a subset of the message table. If its contents got overwritten, it's a relatively simple matter to re-copy the data from the message table, which I'm going to have to do as the last step of this project anyway since the search table has large gaps in it as well as 2 days worth of messages that are pre-edit versions.
We can't, and shouldn't have to, impose any kind of ratio restrictions on any board.
It should be good enough to just stick with one of the primary tenets of the site: "Say what you want about any company you want, but keep it civil."
Getting back to the idea of the ratio itself, that's impossible to do programmatically. I can't fathom any way to have software reliably distinguish between "positive relevant dd" and "blatant bash". Forgetting for the moment the common misconception whereby "negative relevant dd" is too often mischaracterized as "blatant bash".
edit test again
Edit Test: Apparently Catalog updating happens in fits and starts, not realtime. It took 3 minutes for my message to show up in search, but when it did show up, so did another message written a minute later that also contained my search term.
Edit: Enough effort this morning wasted on trying to make it more realtime. Regardless, it can't be worse than previous update performance (and retrieval performance has already proven to be orders of magnitude faster) and may actually improve once I'm done and the system is dealing with far smaller search tables and catalogs that have to be updated in realtime.
one more search test
3 minutes, 50 seconds. Dammit!
I'm not finding any discussion anywhere on the subject, but am wondering if the fact that this search table's "Update Index in Background" is enabled, is overriding the sp_fulltext_service('resourceusage') setting. That setting was 4 and I bumped it up to 5 (highest level) but noticed MSDN lists a setting of "1" as being "Background".
The database server has enough horsepower that it should be able to make MSSearch its highest priority and still have more than enough resources left to do all the SQL stuff it has to do.
Another search test with indexing priority raised.
38 seconds on that one.
It's very hit or miss on how long it takes for a new message to show up in search. The one I'm replying to happened sometime in the 2 minutes it took before I checked again. The previous one was a good 18 minutes.