Year: 2009

Watchlist for September 15th and random thoughts

Only a couple stocks on watch tonight. I’ve been working on my taxes … one problem with being a full-time trader is that I have to deal with estimated taxes. And considering how much I banked last year I don’t just want to use the 110% prior year tax safe harbor provision … which means I have to calculate my income every single quarter to figure out what to send to Uncle Samwise (if you have no clue what I just said, please buy JK Lasser’s Your Income Tax 2009). My tax burden so far this year has paid for either two home-buyer subsidies, the pointless destruction of six working cars, or the bonus that Goldman would give to one janitor.

Another note: I’m about to purchase a very large uninterruptible power supply for my computer. Last Friday I had a two-second power outage that reset my computer and while I wasn’t in any trades, I do not want to deal with that again. In the event of a longer power outage a UPS would give me time to boot up my laptop before power to my main computer runs out.

ZOOM – Huge run today. This was not just because of the news of earnings at their subsidiary; if it were because of the news the stock would’ve gapped all the way up. Instead it ran most of the way late in the day. That means it was momentum buying that drove it up. This is a low-float stock and these are often runners. I would short but I am sure there will be no shares. It might get some follow-through buying tomorrow morning.

zoom

GVBP – Pure pump and dump (see Tim Sykes’ writeup). I’m short from $0.39556 following a Timothy Sykes TimAlert. This likely will go up more tomorrow and Wednesday and then fall. I had to short today because there will likely be no more shares available to short tomorrow.

gvbp

Disclosure: Short 18,500 shares of GVBP. I have a disclosure policy.

Oh, and if you want some light entertainment, check out this amusing use of the devil-spawn AutoTune:

Watchlist for Monday, September 14th

SSN – long on strength, huge volume Friday, no news.

ssn

AMIE – up on debt restructuring, long on strength.

amie

TIV – filed amended annual report Friday, long on strength.

tiv

CNWI – crappy pump, IB had shares Friday, short on weakness, too risky to buy now.

cnwi

VRMLQ – the Q means it is bankrupt. So why then skyrocket 2400% Friday on news? This is a crazy stock and I’ll avoid it.

vrmlq

INHX – still short-biased on weakness.

inhx

Probably the most interesting of the above to me are TIV as a long and INHX as a short.

Disclosure: No positions. I have a disclosure policy.

Interactive Brokers now has an iPhone app!

Interactive Brokers has cheap commissions ($0.005 per share, minimum of only $1 per trade), awesome executions, great borrows on many hard-to-short stocks, and a great trading platform (trader’s workstation or TWS). Up until now there were only two things I did not like about IB: they had a bad mobile trading platform and they had horrible customer service. With the release of the iPhone real-time trading application IB has finally corrected one of their last significant flaws. But don’t worry: they still have incredibly horrid customer service. Here is what they have to say about their new iTWS trading platform:

IB’s state-of-the-art iTWS provides electronic access to your IB account from your iPhoneTM. iTWS lets you enter and manage orders, view executions, monitor your account balance – all from your iPhone!

With iTWS, you can:

  • View real-time streaming market data.
  • Trade stocks, options and futures worldwide.
  • Take advantage of our SmartRoutingTM technology, which searches for the best price available at the time of your order and dynamically routes and re-routes all or part of your order to achieve optimal execution.
  • Monitor your trades.
  • Monitor account information.
  • Manage your portfolio.

Disclosure: No positions. I am a generally satisfied customer of IB and I have my main trading account there. IB has no affiliate program so I get nothing for recommending them.

I'm going to Las Vegas!

Yes, that is right! I just signed up for Tim Sykes’ Las Vegas pennystocking seminar. I will be in Las Vegas from Saturday October 17th until Tuesday October 20th and I will be staying at the Excalibur (yay for cheap rooms on the strip!). It is still not too late for you stragglers to sign up for the seminar. The seminar is truly a great deal as I explained in my earlier post on 8 reasons why you should go. For an investment of only $847 you get to attend a seminar that lasts for two full days (if you cannot attend, Tim offers the option of seeing a live webcast of the event), you get to meet such great pennystockers as myself and InvestorsLive (not to mention Tim Sykes), you receive DVD recordings of the entire seminar, you receive any one of Tim Sykes’ DVD packages, you get to attend the wild and raucous pennystocking party Tim will hold at the end of the seminar day (at which I have foolishly pledged to buy a round of drinks for everyone and Tim Sykes will be goaded into doing likewise).

So don’t be a party pooper and sign up for the Vegas seminar today! If anyone who is going is interested, I would like to get together Saturday night to shoot the shit, eat food, and pound back some iced teas (no way am I going to get a hangover before this awesome conference!)

Daily trade recap for September 10th and watchlist for September 11th

Video trade recap and watchlist. See my recap of my great trade on XSNX which was the only interesting trade I had today.

Daily profit: $1,602.90



Watchlist

QELP – up 103% on no news but huge volume. Could be good either way. Long on strength, short on green/red action.

RVEP – same deal, up 100% (but on tiny volume of 150k shares). Both of these are master-limited partnerships that deal with energy (likely pipelines). What that means is that if you trade them you will have to file a form 1065 (annoying).

QRCP – long on red/green or breaks to new highs tomorrow. $0.90 is an important point but it will be overextended if it hits that so I wouldn’t look to buy then.

INHX – up 100% on huge volume and no news in three days. Short on green/red and fading price action. This is my prime candidate for a trade tomorrow.

Disclosure: No positions. I have a disclosure policy.

How I made $1,600 (20%) by short selling pump & dump XSUNX, Inc (Public, OTC:XSNX)

XSUNX (OTC BB: XSNX) was pumped this morning by StockPreacher (whose pump of ALAN was an awesome short for me months ago) and Beacon Equity (both are owned by the same people). They were paid 900,000 shares by the company to promote it. Timothy Sykes had a good blog post about this pump. You can see the pumper’s disclaimer below. One nice little touch is that Beacon Equity’s disclaimers are images so it is harder to search to see how much they were paid for each pump.

xsnx_disclaimer
(click here for a larger 1-day chart of XSNX).

XSNX
XSNX

As a result of the pump the stock jumped from $0.12 to $0.22 in under 15 minutes. I sold short 35,000 shares at $0.202 at Interactive Brokers just as it started to fade off of its day’s high. The one problem with short selling such a cheap stock is it is not only not marginable, but short selling stocks under $2.50 per share requires $2.50 per share in cash. So short selling this stock required that I use $87,500 in cash. Still, It was a super-easy short with little risk. Except for the first minute, this trade was never in the red. The stock fell quickly with only anemic bounces. Just over one hour later I covered my short position at $0.156 when I got bored and netted $1,612.37 with a profit margin of 22.8%

By the way, it is still not too late to sign up for Tim Sykes’ Las Vegas Seminar on October 18th and 19th. If two more people sign up using my affiliate link in the next couple days then I will go to the seminar too! See my previous post on the seminar for all the great reasons you should go (and a special benefit–a phone consultation with me–for those who sign up using my affiliate link).

I should also point out that I informed my Twitter followers about my intention to short XSNX even before I got filled on my short sale order so any of them with Interactive Brokers could have easily made 20% shorting this pump & dump with me!

Disclosure: No positions. I have a disclosure policy.

Watchlist for September 10th

No charts tonight as Stockcharts.com is down. I can’t say I did a super-thorough job scanning tonight. I’m a bit tired after my intense trading day today. I’ll update the list in the comments tomorrow to add in my thoughts on pre-market leaders.

ENCO – short on green/red. Its news today wasn’t that great and it faded slowly all day after its initial morning spike.

OPXA – I expect more red, but less than today. I probably won’t trade it again.

AEN – Same as OPXA.

VVUS – I like it as a buy on the break of today’s high of $12.50. The news was good and obesity drugs may get the daytraders all excited.

Disclosure: No positions. I have a disclosure policy.

A tribute to a great trade on Opexa Therapeutics Inc. (NASDAQ:OPXA)

Good day today! I nailed OPXA and AEN and I was lucky and didn’t lose on VVUS despite accidentally buying 10 times more shares than I intended (+$142.75 on that). I made $2,537.60 on OPXA (9.5%) and $340.32 on AEN. +$83 on a quick scalp of ENCO long (by the way, if you follow me on Twitter you saw I called it as a short at .90 and said it would close around $0.73 … it actually closed at $0.70; too bad I didn’t follow my own advice to short it).

By the way, it is still not too late to sign up for Tim Sykes’ Las Vegas Seminar on October 18th and 19th. If three more people sign up using my affiliate link in the next couple days then I will go to the seminar too! See my previous post on the seminar for all the great reasons you should go (and a special benefit for those who sign up using my affiliate link).

One thing I should point out about my trades today … I often scalp Tim Sykes’ TimAlerts, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t believe they are good for longer-term trading. Today I actually shorted OPXA 30 minutes before Tim Sykes shorted it and covered it over an hour after he covered and I didn’t scalp off of his alert at all (I did add 2,000 shares to my position when he shorted).

Today’s profit: $3,103.67

Disclosure: No positions. I have a disclosure policy.