Stock Insight

Market, pandemic and my own evolution on them

2020-05-09T15:27:00.000-07:00

I was paying close attention to the pandemic in January, as I went to college in Wuhan, and I still have families and friends there. Note the corona virus were not isolated to Wuhan either. I remember in early days (late Jan till Feb 19), the US stock market was still going up, and I traded the Ctrip.com ADR stock (TCOM on Nasdaq, old ticker symbol was CTRP), and did not lose shirt. Then the bottom started to fall out, note I did not have any insider or intelligence information that some of the US senators have (they have since dumped stocks in middle of February). When I was trading, probably as I sold the high flyers such as $OKTA, I bought some $LUV which is Southwest air, and I also accumulated quite a few Disney stocks $DIS. Those turned out to be my biggest losers, esp. Disney. I decided to dump $LUV on March 5, and I dumped my remaining 80 $DIS shares yesterday May 8.

Even the good old Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A and BRK.B, I only have the B shares) is not immune to all these shocks. I noticed Buffett said long term "don't bet against America", but this time around unlike last time in Fall 2008, he did not say "Buy America". There are multiple challenges in American economy in last 20 years. The benefits of economy growth mostly went to the super rich, the top 1% or .1%. The country is politically very much divided, the nationalism even the white supremacy is on the rise. Looking around, esp. in the news and on the twitter, we can see those trend. In real life though, I feel people are still mostly decent. I don't know how the November election or the economy will work out. But I believe for little investor like me, there is still opportunities. I shared some ideas on twitter. Personally I think this WFH, digital transformation, going to cloud trend will continue, some said in 2 months companies have done 2 years of digital transformation. A good example is distance learning (online learning).

Btw, if you are interested in reading more on stocks, etc., you may visit my personal blog site stlplace.com.

America's Fundamental Misunderstanding of China | Kishore Mahbubani

2020-05-06T18:39:00.001-07:00

Peloton PTON

2020-04-26T11:25:00.000-07:00

Quote: (link here)
Shares of home-fitness cycling company Peloton Interactive (PTON) on Friday jumped over 6% after a record 23,000 exercisers participated in its live streaming class.

Is Peloton Worth It? What are the Alternatives?

Full Disclosure: I don't have the Peloton subscriptions (bike and treadmills). I prefer to run outside, and when the #stlwx is bad, I will go to JCC (when they reopens). I do own 102 shares of $PTON as of this writing.

Year 2019 review

2020-02-16T09:41:00.000-08:00

I put more money into stocks last year. Besides the IRA in TD, I also moved the money in Vanguard IRA into stocks. Note both brokers now waive the trading fees now. This may have some implications on my trading strategy. I think the performance for the TD account last year was somewhere between 50% and 60%. Note Buffett once said, if he is managing a few millions account, his goal is 100% yearly.

My biggest winner is $OKTA. I also bought some $ZM. My account hit high in July 2019 when we were vacationing in Colorado. Since then the $OKTA dropped some, and I made some mistakes too. Some losers include $WORK.

This year I plan to do similar things: I have about half of my TD positions in OKTA, ZM, also $TCOM (trip.com, was ctrip). I did notice Charlie Munger's warning: here is the link https://www.ccn.com/mungers-dire-warning-makes-berkshires-cash-pile-terrifying/

Right now it seems the market does not have much other alternatives. Last year, the trade talk was trying to disrupting the market, this year the CoronaVirus. Even my younger daughter 5 year old knows the virus. And people seems over-react in many cases. The White House was trying to pump up the stocks too, for the right or wrong reasons. I recall Ray Dalio once said due to the wealth distribution issue, the recession will be much more disruptive for people in the bottom spectrum of income level, this time around. That's the main incentive for the government to keep the boom as long as possible.

There is obviously downside to this: because eventually the bubble will pop. Hope by that time, my money will mostly in the Berkshire, Disney and cash.

Robinhood

2019-01-01T20:48:00.001-08:00

I used Robinhood app since 2015 (when they were new). Robinhood recently got in the news again (not in a good way) due to the "checking / savings account" promotion. That aside, I liked the robinhood app for trading, the UI and the zero commission.

I also learned some new technical architectures (AWS, cloud) from Robinhood too.

Some new media and gizmos I used

2019-01-01T20:45:00.002-08:00

Roku (I know Roku player for a while, and I replaced the old Apple TV / gen 2 with this Roku ultimate on black friday 2018).

Cheddar (saw it from LinkedIn)

Now This (saw this from Twitter)

IBM, GE

2017-11-14T16:59:00.001-08:00

(01-01-2019) I have not been to malls for a long time, but recently / today I went to west county mall. Saw this sign at JC Penny (est 1902). I was thinking, like GE, JC Penny is in serious trouble after the 100+ years run. Disrupted by Amazon.

(Original) IBM had a pop after earling recently. And yours truly sold the limited shares held in the DRIP (dividend reinvest plan) on the 1st day after pop. It turns out to be the right move, as I read from news today the Oracle of Omaha cut his IBM stake by another 1/3, and basically looking back now there were only 3 days after recent earning to sell, if you look at the chart.

GE is in similar boat, slightly different situation. It declared the 50% dividend cut yesterday, and the share has been dropping like a rock in last 2 days. Yours truly, being the "bargain hunting" and "catch falling knife" guy, got some shares today. I feel GE's aerospace engine and healthcare business (CT Scan etc.) are both strong, not sure about their power (electricity generation) though. Also not sure about their pension liability. I guess IBM has similar problem in this pension aspect. But IBM has fundamental issue on its business: basically AMZN, GOOG and MSFT are eating their lunch, and dinner nowadays. Cloud is taking away IBM traditional enterprise software business.

Cloud, cloud, cloud

2017-10-27T19:51:00.002-07:00

(Update 01-01-2019) Came across this piece from Mary Meeker. (PPT and video presentation). It seems China's top 2 Internet players Alibaba and Tencent are catching up with the FAANGs quickly (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google).

Also, the CNBC EastTechWest is also interesting. The full video for day 3 is here at Youtube.

(Update 07-08-2018) Came across this multi-cloud article from Glenn.

(Original) Today's Amazon and Alphabet (Google parent company) both beat the wall street on earning, and the stock jumped. The cloud computing has been there for a while, and there were certainly hypes at times, but most recently, I felt the trend is real. Just by looking at the companies such as Okta (Single sign-on vendor, IPO'ed this year) to startup such as Hashicorp (open source software for dev ops). I have experienced Docker, Vagrant and Consul slightly (the latter 2 are Hashicorp software). This time though, it felt like real.

This also means big old giant such as IBM, it's increasingly become irrelevant. It can say the right words to wall street such as cloud, high growth area such as Watson or analytics. But keep in mind, the bulk of the profit is from traditional wares such as mainframe, DB2 and websphere. Maybe some cognos. :-)

Btw, I sold the shares in the DRIP the day after earning. I may lose a few $ of the upside by selling virtually at the open, but I did get some more sleep back :-)

Amazon, amazon, amazon; web, web, web

2017-06-16T19:31:00.001-07:00

Amazon just announced buying the Whole Foods Market, the No. 1 US organic food grocer. WFM led the market, and nowadays from Kroger to Wal-Mart, from The Fresh Market, to Sprout Farmer Market, from Aldi to Trader Joe's, here locally in St. Louis, from Dierbergs, Schnucks, everybody is doing organic food.

But the former leader WFM is losing its leader status, and same store sales fell in recent years. At the same time, Amazon has been exploring the food market for a while, and they must saw an opportunity in WFM.

AMZN stock has gone up many many folds in recent years, with its ever dominance on the online market and the cloud (AWS and EC2) services. Both No. 1 in each category.

I fell in a way, many traditional store did not realize the importance of this brick mortar to online shift, and missed the boat. Borders is a good example, at one point, they even outsourced the website to Amazon (which reminds me of Yahoo outsourced search to Google at one point). One never outsource the critical part of its business to a competitor.

Yada, yada, yada

2017-05-11T20:40:00.000-07:00

The dive of $IBM after Buffett said he sold 1/3 of his $IBM stake. At the same time, all the BRK shareholder meeting (Saturday Q&A, business meeting, Yahoo Finance lunch break show etc.) is available at Yahoo Finance (video) and Podcast (iTunes).

Noted Buffett also gave an almost unqualified praise of Jeff Bezos and Amazon, at the same time he gave a cold shoulder to IBM. I think it's probably went two extremes in both cases, I mean the share price now. Anyway $AMZN is already way too expensive, and $IBM probably will bounce.

And when it bounces, I will seriously think about sell it and switch it to Robinhood and buying winners like Huntsman corp, Amex and Monsanto (be acquired by Bayer, very likely the deal will go through).

Btw, Monsanto is across street from my house :-)

Time to sell $IBM

2017-05-04T20:07:00.000-07:00

I had this feeling after recent drop. It appears I should have sold it about 2 to 3 months ago (above $180). And Buffett agrees.

My other thinking is I like to move money from the DRIP (dividend reinvesting) account at ComputerShare to Robinhood.

This DRIP at ComputerShare place reminds me a bit like my sharebuilder (bought by ING Savings or Capital One) experiment. Here one issue is the trading cost was higher than I thought. I will probably keep the $XOM stock there as I believe we still need oil for the years to come, in fact I recall Charlie Munger said human beings are going to use every drop of it.

Last but not least, this Saturday is the Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholder meeting. It will be broadcast live again via Yahoo Finance.

Tableau $DATA earning

2017-05-03T18:31:00.001-07:00

I have not bet on earning (ER) for a while, this time around I did not break the rule either. But Tableau stock $DATA exploded after the earning report, it went up to $60 during the conference call, as the subscription revenue beats analysts estimate. It also beat the revenue and the earning per reports.

It seems I missed some upside for my about 50 shares of $DATA (bought at $52.79, sold at $54.98).

Huntsman Huntsman $HUN

2017-04-26T19:24:00.002-07:00

I have owned $HUN stock for almost 10 years, initially from the financial crisis (2009?). I did not get the $2.xx batches, but I got it at about $5 I think. Have done buying and selling all these years, until last year (Jan) the stock fell out of the bottom, it was sold at $7.xx one day. I got some, and still have some :-)

Today 25-Apr-2017 was the day for Q1 2017 earning release. I think they did well, also adding the spinoff (IPO) of the pigments division, the stock initially popped. It dropped afterwards, before I can get some, it went back above $25 again.

On a separate (totally unrelated news), Jon Huntsman Sr. (the founder and executive chairman) had a feud with the president of the U of Utah, as well as the president of UU health system (Asian lady). I am not sure if the race played any factor here. Because the initial incident was the head of health system fired the head of the cancer institute (Huntsman gave generously to the cancer institute).

Last but not least, I got some $EBAY stock after selling $DATA and $ETSY in my robinhood app account. Also shameless plug here: anyone who wants a robinhood referral, please let me know. They have commision free trading platform. I have used them about 2 years and liked it so far (compared to the commission paid to Scottrade, Robinhood is a gem :-)

Got rid of problem kids (aka stocks)

2017-04-20T19:18:00.001-07:00

Sold $WDR today, after it hits $17.50 (my cost is $17, I will also get 25 cents per share for dividend).

Bought $EBAY. Think sell $DATA as well to make room for $EBAY.

I mentioned I sold $ETSY and $LULU last week.

(Update 04-25-2017) I did sell $DATA and got more $EBAY. Was trying to sell more $DATA for $ESRX but was not successful :-(

Too many problem kids (stocks)

2017-04-07T15:16:00.000-07:00

So I sold the $ETSY stock last week when it's hit $10.70. I bought it at $10.50 the beginning of March, when the stock was in freefall after the ER. But I got another problem kid ($WDR), the declining mutual fund manager (asset manager), it seems compared to Blackrock, Fidelity and Vanguard, $WDR is just too small and too old.

Add to that, I got into the $LULU after earning miss. I placed a limit order trying to sell, it did not hit my price ($52.50), it only hit $52.18 on the day I wanted to sell. So I guess I will probably hold it like the $ETSY.

Last but not least, the $DATA, so far it did not meet my expectation. I am not selling at a loss either.

The main issue here is I cannot hold too many losers at the same time.

(Update 04-14-2017) I unloaded $LULU sometime this week, at $52.58. But I added some $HUN at $24.10 and that part of $HUN is underwater amid the selloff on Thursday (closed at $23.38).

To re-phrase, my current problem kids are $DATA and $WDR.

Couple moon shot ideas (stocks)

2017-03-11T13:27:00.000-08:00

Tableau ($DATA): it's the leader in data visualization software. This mid-size software company stock took quite a hit last year, it recovered some since that drop. I feel it's still the best in the data visualization space, with a few new competitors such as Domo (private, may come to IPO sometime down the road). It's possible some big guys will try to buy them down the road. But we never buy a company stock based on the acquisition speculation. The valuation is fairly cheap as software company can easily fetch 10 times ETIBA or Revenue for high growth companies (some reference here at Quora).

Etsy ($ETSY): probably No. 1 website for DIY artists selling stuff. Etsy is quite unique since it's does not have a big direct online competitor. Ebay and Amazon probably don't care too much about this niche market, while websites like Cafepress is just so-so (quality is not there). The profit is not there since this is still a growth company, just like the early days of Amazon: a lot of technology investment.

ComputerShare DRIP plan hands on : Exxon and IBM

2017-03-01T19:52:00.000-08:00

I decided to give the DRIP a try about two years ago, because I did not have much "play money" in stock portfolio, and I felt at the time it's hard to beat the market. That was around the time I hold the bag on Coach ($COH) and National-Oilwell Varco ($NOV). Traded on some national gas and oil service play such as Southwest Energy, and Cabot Oil & Gas Corporation (NYSE:COG), too. That was the time the oil and gas really fell off the cliff and everybody in the industry was nervous.

It was also the time I was not feel confident on the stock trading. And I seriously doubt I could beat the market. So I decided to give the DRIP a try, DRIP stands for the dividend reinvestment plan. I picked Exxon and IBM. The former started to drop as oil went down; the latter was in the news due to the declining revenue and Buffett bought a stake at the time.

Those two DRIP turns out to be ok, though I stopped adding new money into it a while ago, stopped buying new Exxon shares first, then IBM. At this writing IBM is at one year high, and $XOM dropped to low $80s which is about $10 shy of its high.

These days I feel better about trading stocks (though I no longer actively trade). I mainly trade the Robinhood (play money for stocks) and Scottrade (play money from IRA) accounts. About a year ago I bought some Huntsman share at low price, today I finally sold some. I bought some Monsanto share too. Most recently I bought some Tableau $DATA and Etsy $ETSY shares. I am hoping for $HUN like return on those two. I know $MON money will not go to roof as there is a ceiling price.

A year later: Robinhood app, Huntsman corp and other stocks I traded last year

2017-02-28T19:42:00.002-08:00

I am out of the tech stocks I mentioned last year. Made a small profit from the $FIT trade. It seems I missed the big upside from Square Inc $SQ if I have hold it till now. But getting out of $FIT was the right move. So as Twitter $TWTR.

I recall I bought Huntsman Corp stock $HUN early last year when it went down in the Jan 2016 sell off. I have since added some more. I also traded some Amex $AXP stocks, Ford $F, and Monsanto $MON. There may be more, such as Crocs $CROX, Gogo.

At this time, I got some Tableau $DATA. I want to bet on things that has less risk (downside).

Meanwhile, I am also accumulating the Credit Card / Checking Account opening bonus.

Dogs of four recent tech IPOs

2016-05-17T19:42:00.004-07:00

FIT: Fitbit ($FIT), still the leader of fast growing wearable category.

GPRO: GoPro ($GPRO), GoPro the motion camera maker.

Both FIT and GPRO are one trick pony, with FIT has a bit wider appeal (health, fitness) vs. sports enthusiast for GPRO.

TWTR: Twitter, it did not grow into Facebook, and overshadowed by Instagram, etc.

SQ: Square Inc, the payment upstart went through a lot changes in business model since the beginning.

The latter two are Jack Dorsey's companies (he is the CEO for both cos)

For now I think all the stocks above are only a trade.

Disclaimer: I have small amount of FIT and SQ shares at this moment. I prefer them over GPRO and TWTR.

More missed opportunities

2014-07-16T14:14:00.000-07:00

Hindsight is 20/20. Those are the stocks I once owned but sold too early, besides those I listed earlier.

ARMH
Cyh
Tdc
Mjn
Bac
Gogo

ICE
HUN

Last but not least ALGT, I traded it on its IPO at $25 12-08-2006. It's trading at $158 as of today 01-13-2015 (about 8 years later). Why did not hold on this winner while trading the other losing stock named Heelys???

(Click on the images to enlarge)

It's hard to watch coal sector dwindling

2014-07-08T17:35:00.002-07:00

I used to work for coal company, more specifically, Arch Coal, Inc. (NYSE:ACI). The industry is in secular declining mode, as we can read those recent news from Barrons, or Bloomberg. Btw, I think Walter Energy may not survive, Peabody should. Not sure about ACI though.

This is personal not only because I worked in the coal industry for a while, but also I saw the first hand how hard working the coal miners and how hard their working conditions are. I know in past few years, the down turn of thermal coal has devastating effect on central Appalachian (east Kentucky, and West Virginia).

Separately, I saw in the glassdoor.com review, that some of my former coworkers who were not happy with ACI, and put up some negative reviews there. This is just silly, in my opinion.

Will Coach ever come back to its previous dominance position?

2014-06-20T18:57:00.001-07:00

Coach, Inc. (COH) has dominated the affordable luxury bag market for more than 10 years, until recently its momentum got taken by upstarts like Michael Kors, esp. in the US market. I recall a few years ago, amid the US financial crisis, specifically in June 2008, Starbucks (SBUX) the coffee company has experienced a similar situation, at least in terms of the stock price, it went to about $7 to $8 range. The company came back now, the stock is worth about $70. Is there any similarities in those two companies or situations? Is there any good chance for Coach to come back?

Personally I think the situation was a bit different. In the case of SBUX, the main problem was they expanded too fast, growth without profitability, and hit a perfect storm with financial crisis. They had some competitors such as McDonald, Panrea Bread (PNRA), Donkin Donuts, etc. But no direct or strong competitor. Peet's coffee is much smaller. Their problem (growing too fast) was mostly self inflicted, and since Schultz came back, he righted the ship and the size, now everything is working the way it supposed to work.

In the case of Coach, it's both their own mistake (too much discount, value conscious in outlet stores), plus the upstart competitors (MK is the strongest one). Can those be fixed? I guess it's possible, but not easy. Thus the recent investor conference, they laid out their plan: pretty much "throwing out kitchen sink" plan. It will work if they can achieve the new "modern luxury" as they promised, at the same time stabilize the US sales, and keep the China growth going. All are not trivial. For the investors, expect some bumps on the ride, it won't be a smooth ride, even if eventually they come back.

PS, just saw Coach and Michael Kors China websites. Coach is much better than Kors. This is not a fair comparison, as Kors even does not have a Chinese name. Btw the Chinese name for Coach is

蔻驰.

PS 2, saw the news Juicy Couture is closing down. I did not know their main piece the tracksuits until now. Coach has a much wider appeal though, esp. in the women's bag category.

Trading stocks and change job

2014-06-20T00:36:00.001-07:00

I am thinking recently, this trading stocks too frequently thing is very similar to changing job too often. But are bad. Because as human beings we think we can outsmart the market, but we don't. At least this applies to me personally. Similar goes to the jobs. Of course for job change, there is both economy and other impact, usually we trade new job for better pay, but usually come with a hidden cost: the initial ramp up cost of a new job, and the lost of people connection due to change job often, loss of 401k match (vesting period, economy again), the potential of career growth at one company...There might be some plus side for IT jobs: exposure to various technologies and projects, makes one more versatile. At least hopefully :-)

More lost lottery tickets

2014-06-20T00:32:00.001-07:00

Logitech (LOGI), LogmeIn (LOGM) and Sprint (S)

I will elaborate them later. Not as big jump as the earlier ones BEE and RUTH :-)

Btw, an interesting article on the companies benefiting from Obama Care (the ACA). Besides those companies, I saw CERN (Cerner, medical software), and CNC (Centene, Medicaid insurer) are also high these days.

Will Cheetah Mobile become the next NQ Mobile?

2014-06-08T05:48:00.003-07:00

It looks like it. I have not done extensive financial analysis on it, but its main product: battery doctor, clean master, etc. smell like snake oil, in my opinion. I can explain it a bit if needed. Basically there is no way to use software to optimize battery charging for smart phones. The battery life of phone is still a challenge, there are tips around it, such as this one. But not battery doctor. I have first hand experience on this. I bought a similar iOS battery app, and used it for a while, eventually just let it sit there. After iOS 6.1 update, the app was no longer in app store.

For the Clean Master, it's even funnier. I saw this Tweet, basically it was saying it claimed cleared 16gb from a Nexus 8gb model. There is possibility it's calculating the cumulative cleaned storage. But the author said he only used the phone for half an hour.

I wish they be successful, but the reality of the products, coupled with the old story of a similar company NQ Mobile (Yahoo finance), made me think about it. The brokers can say whatever they want, pump the stock (Yahoo finance: CMCM) etc. But at the end of the day, it's the small investors/speculators got hurt. Remember the fiasco of Longtop financial technologies (NYTimes story)?