Confessions of a Stock Operator.... to the bourbon and to Bourbon in the morning, This is the question, so at least I have pre retirement and retirees thinking, which was my point. (it is not to talk the stock price down, nobody can talk a stock down that is 20 bucks (when I first started saying get out, and when it broke support at 18 when I was yelling dump everything, hit the sell button, be a man. etc...) and trades half a million shares a day, by somebody who posts what I have posted on a simple chat board. (I wish I had the power).
Also, jaguar did a nice job selectively going through my posting history, and as I have said before, I am not perfect and get a lot wrong at periodic points in time, but to simply point out two obvious examples, I too got carried away with SAVA, for instance,
but if you examine my last 10 posts that took place over this year for sure, and later last year on the various boards, like sava, avxl snpx etc, and to be fair, you will see that I have been very negative on the stock, consistently saying at a stock price of 58, it was going back to the low 40s, at 48, back to the low and mid 30s, at 37 back to the low 20s, and 33, back to the teens and most recently on this board, that it would return to 2.50, something like that. I posted all of this on various boards including this one, and maintaining that the science of each were connected in the stock market (perhaps not in the lab) so to hate sava is to hate anavex. I haven't owned SAVA for a long time, but over the last year, since it broke above 30 during the AMC meme craze, which pushed it to 145, pulled out many hundreds of thousands of dollars from the stock, and I did the same to its companion, which is anavex. Even more many hundreds of thousands, while also predicting Anavex was in the process of a major collapse, and said that many times here, as my detractors know and rue, and AVXL did in fact collapse. My latest prediction is around 3.20............I find in all the stocks, with my nose like a weasels, and my spidey senses tingling, that I cannot ever it seems, make a single decision about a stock or a sector or the stock market in general. It takes a while for me to get the direction correct, and sometimes the tuition I have to pay is financially steep, but that is how it works with me, to finally avoid the catastrophic loss and get the longer term call correct. That is my history for years and years, how I work and did not plan it that way for sure.
The key as I have said, is not to just make money, but to employ a different skill set thereafter, which is to keep it, and to turn bearish on the markets, which I am now, keeping ill gotten gains in of almost 2 million in X, but it is true, giving back bits and pieces of that major score in the various other stocks jaguar as listed that I did own, as they turned bearish, but still keeping about 2/3 of that score, which is the whole point isn't it? To make and manage to keep money by reading markets correctly, and for got sake not be an Ostrich or be a poor stock speculator and give it all back? And that is what retail does, they give it all back. People here are familiar with this experience, but to Bourbon's point, and as Lenin once wrote, what is to be done? (now).
Bourbon correctly sets forth the 3 choices pretty much. But this is to little to late. But slants them in certain ways.
1. as to cash, and how Bourbon presents choice one, it would have been nice to have had this option in anavex about 3 months ago, and then at the price of 22 (for instance), that even a 50% decline would have given one the option to rebuy at 11, or perhaps not. You will all find that once you are in a stock there is a tendency and almost psychological need to want to stay in it. The key of owning stocks and making money, as I have posted here many times, is to have the strength to sell. That is it, that is RULE ONE. I have said women buy, but men must have the capacity to put the credit cards away and sell. When the stock hits 11, you can then make an independent assessment of market conditions, and about the significance of the speed of the decline, and why the decline.
Cash is never, to be clear, a bad thing. Never. Warren is sitting on oodles and oodles of cash. I would never be out of the stock market for a year, but have many times been out for 6 or 9 months. Most bears do not last a year, and with the vast majority, you will generally find a bottom in the first 9 months of a bear, making a terrific entry but not always, the bear of the early 1930s went down and down for over 3 years after the 29 crash. Not sure if we are looking at that but given the radical nature of the radicals and the white collar criminals now running the u.s. government agencies, indeed the entire criminal superstructure that acts now as a RICO, (racketeering enterprise) we might well be. The money printing and "liquidity injections" have never existed pretty much before. ......ww2 being an exception......america ran a square house 30 years ago. It was not taken over, with all this nonsense The Fed Is Gone smoke blown up the citizen's azzes. ...etc
Cash is a tremendous choice in a deflation bottom line, and the assumption that we are in an inflation which is what the public believes now, and what cnbc and cnn spout out, is false....to be late to the party and stay even later, is to be wrong. To be right about something at the wrong time, is to be wrong. I know only one thing to do when I am wrong and that is to get right, to sell. A hard skill, that only a few on this board have.
My posts have been about saving older gents who are fatuous, their money, and I know I have done that. The ones who are down 50 or 60 percent or more in their ports, well, one might surmise that they are fools and their money or dreamers or who knows....maybe weak and unable to admit mistakes in their lives......
Bourbon's option 2. That is something that is still an option, but not for me, not with anavex or sava. I have trouble shorting stocks where I have made a ton and there is an outlier of either a bear market rally or something amazing in biotech, with news, etc, so I don't do it here and now with these two and I am bad at shorting historically, something I now need to revisit. Each to his own.
Bourbon's choice number 3, to stick with avxl and ride it down, etc. ........that is unacceptable for me, I never ride anything down, every at any time, it is a non starter. Whether this little baby bio will then rise like a phoenix to the heavens is not even part of the discussion. I stop at "ride it down." Not if my supposition is that we are in a bear market, and the early stages, but even in the latest stages of a bear, I never ever ride anything down. I just pass on hitting the buy button. But it's true, I have made a lot of bad purchases the past 2 years, but the key is to quickly sell them.
Put away the dreams and be a fast seller and what you will find is that you accumulate (for me at least), dozens of little losses, but your several winners where you got it right will make up for all the little hunches gone wrong, and your portfolio will end up be massively profitable, and all with a litte 300 desketop, you can make several million, with no employees, no overhead, no huge factory, not worrying about the hundreds little decisions that are involved in running a 400 person business. Just a tiny pc desktop.
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