Thursday, May 03, 2007

Junk Stocks, Bad Trades, and Complicated Security

Several themes today.... I bought 25,000 shares in FLIP.OB, aka FTS, this morning. Yes it's a penny stock. Literally. I bought at 1.84 cents a share spending $467 in total including commissions. This trade would have cost about $80 in commission using Interactive Brokers instead of $7 with Ameritrade! Unlike many or most bulletin board stocks with similar charts, FTS actually makes money. It even has free cash flow. And it is selling at about 3 times FCF or a P/E of 2. I'm willing to make a small bet on this stock - maybe something is actually really wrong and the stock goes to zero or maybe it increases 4 or 5 times over in the near future to reach a more reasonable P/E. Risking less than $500 to make maybe a couple of thousand sounds OK to me. The company is a retailer of cellphones, satellite dishes etc.

Talking of junk stocks, the administrators of Croesus Mining (CRS.AX) poked their head out the rabbit hole they've been hiding in for the last few months. They say that they are now focusing in the next three months on recapitalizing Croesus. So this stock still might trade again one day, though likely at a value similar to FTS :)

Trading very badly today and giving back the profits I made in the last couple of days. The stockmarket remains extremely strong and overbought. The model gives short signals which can be profitable but they are reversing very fast at the moment and I haven't been nimble enough to get out before the uptrend resumes.

In a collaborative effort with my Mom on the other side of the world we managed to access her new account with a well-known global investment bank. This involved her working a special card reader, an access card, and a pin number and me entering numbers into the computer here. It reminded me of movies where thieves are trying to get into some fiendishly complicated safe. Any moment they might set off the alarms :) It's nice to know the money is secure!

4 comments:

Adventures In Money Making said...

looks like you're up 20% on FLIP ;-)

how did you find this one?

mOOm said...

This is where I first heard about it:

http://www.siliconinvestor.com/readmsg.aspx?msgid=23465353

From Don Wolanchuk.

Anonymous said...

Since IB cap their commissions at 0.5% of trade value, you would have paid less than $3 for this trade with them.

mOOm said...

I can't remember exactly how I came up with the number but the 0.5% cap doesn't include regulatory, exchange fees etc:

http://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/accounts/fees/commission.php?ib_entity=llc

so the commission actually paid would depend on how much these are