Investing 102

[GregWeld]

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.

It's NOT BAD TIMING -- there is some SOB back there watching your every move! I'm telling' ya!

That's EXACTLY why I throw that into my posts once in awhile! Because I swear - a stock can go up every day for a month - and 5 minutes after you buy in - they take 'er down! Ditto on the sale side. I sold 1000 Apple a week or so ago -- I had a nice (huge) gain in it so didn't particularly care about the very last dollar -- but we all want to get the max -- and it was just kinda floating around 400 --- so I pulled the trigger -- within about two days it was up to $420+ --- and that's 20 GRAND! But.... it never fails so you just have to get over it... and understand it... then it doesn't get your goat.