Quote:
Originally Posted by pw2006
Trying to time the market is nearly impossible. As Greg mentioned in an earlier post, there is some dude somewhere watching to see if you you are a buyer or a seller. As soon as you make your move, that dude calls his buddies and moves the stock in the opposite direction. They attacked me twice today!
Earlier this week I decided to reduce a little risk in my portfolio and decided to sell ~50% of one of my speculative position and put that money into a something with less volatility. I wasn't trying to time anything, but ran into some bad timing. That dude was watching me!
One of my speculative positions is in a small, thinly traded biotech (FOLD). I've owned it for a couple years with an average cost of around $5.50. It has been trading between $2.10~$4 for the past few months with lots of volatility. So I sold ~1/2 my FOLD position for ~$3.55 and added to my Chevron (CVX) position.
After the market closed yesterday, Chevron pre-announced they were going to miss their earnings and the stock traded down nearly 2.5% today. And as if that wasn't bad enough, FOLD jumped 30% today and ended the day at $4.54! As I mentioned, I wasn't trying to time anything, just bad timing.
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I understand completely, that dude bites me in the butt 8 out of 10 times. So I do like to attempt to cover it with a little due diligence if at all possible.
I guess I'm really trying to protect myself from real bad timing but it's still timing.
I bought a 100 shares of Nike 35 years ago when they first began trading for $5..........that dude convinced me doubling my money was a good thing and I sold it for $10........the rest is history.
But learning what's important to other successful people is where the learned lesson is.
Right now I'm evaluating my portfolio sector diversity vs risk level and plotting the best options to fill the weak spots in Consumer Staples, Energy, Health Care, Industrials, Materials, and Utilities. I'm weighted heavy in Information Technologies but don't feel too bad because the over-weight products are DELL, HP, INTC, MSFT, MU, ORCL.
Thanks to this thread and the research tools Schwab online provides it's becoming a very entertaining challenge. Business is slow this time of year and our sector outlook is not promising, so at least I feel like I'm accomplishing something.