Welcome to StkyTreat

[billyjoe]

Stky,
Sometimes I get the feeling that you're pulling a fast one on us ,sticky. How old did you say you were ?
----------billyjoe

[JohnHenry]

Stky,
Sometimes I get the feeling that you're pulling a fast one on us ,sticky. How old did you say you were ?
----------billyjoe

I will be 15 on Sept 21. did I say something dumb?

[IIC]

Hey those are my three favorites but it didn't work out to well at the mall. LOL

I think you need to set yourself apart from the crowd Stickey. Do something different at school.

Various girls have different tastes...Some like jocks and some don't...Most like guys with a sensitive side...Helps if you are good looking...But I don't think that is mandatory.

Let's see...what could you do to draw attention to yourself?

Here's an idea...You could start an Unofficial Online School Newspaper...make it controversial (but be prepared to get in hot water w/ the school authorities)...Well, even though I'd make it controversial...maybe you better ask your Mom about that part....I don't want to be responsible for you getting in trouble.

Anyway, if you had a weekly online paper it would give you an excuse to talk to all kinds of people at school...Great Icebreaker..."Hey I'm taking a poll for the paper...What do you think about the cafeteria food"?

You could mention things about a lot of people...people love to see their name up there.

Invite people to submit stuff too...Have a jokes section...you could put in some local news too....Maybe what's playing at the movies, interview the jocks, have a Miss High School Contest, etc...

You could even make a few bux by putting up some Google ads and a couple of affiliate programs. If it caught on you could even sell advertising to local businesses that cater to students.

I think you'd become a real popular guy!!!

Now, I don't know if you are a big mouth kinda guy (Like Me) or more reserved...But, let me give you a little advice...My girlfriends in my HS days were pretty outgoing types...But don't forget the shy ones...My Mom used to tell me that so and so's mother said her daughter likes you...My answer would always be "I don't think so...they don't even pay attention to me"...Well, at my 20 year reunion 3 girls came up to me and told me that they did...I said "Thanks for telling me...it's a little late now"...Happened again at my 30 yr too...Oh well...Best, Doug(IIC)

[billyjoe]

Doug,
The beauty of my HS class almost gagged me at the 30th reunion and some that went unnoticed in school are real lookers now. Remember that Sticky. What is an attractive feature at age 15 may be grotesque by age 40.

---------billyjoe

[IIC]

Doug,
The beauty of my HS class almost gagged me at the 30th reunion and some that went unnoticed in school are real lookers now. Remember that Sticky. What is an attractive feature at age 15 may be grotesque by age 40.

---------billyjoe

Well...at my 10 year reunion I'd say over half looked almost the same...But there was this one girl who was real quiet in HS...sort of a loner and really didn't keep herself up all that well...a Plain Jane type IMO...At the 10 year reunion she was a knockout...she lived in the Carribean and was some sort of Club Med Director...At the 20 year reunion she looked horrible...Her skin looked like one of Lye's herd...She didn't come to the 30th.

But you are right...especially at my 20th...The best and worst lookers from HS mostly flip flopped...But by the 30th about the only good looking one's were some the guys wives who didn't go to my school.

[JohnHenry]

Sticky, why haven't you asked your parents to purchase at least one of the books I've recommended to you? They will answer many if not most of your questions.

Hi DSteckler

Last week my sister took me down to B&N to look for the books that you recommended "The Wall Street Journal Guide to Understanding Money and Investments," by Kenneth Morris. They didn’t have the book because it was out of print. My sister was able to buy it online as an early birthday present.

Dude looks like a great book, a brand new book for eight dollars. WOW! What a great bargain. Well give me an hour or two to read this.

Any other books you like to share? Thank a lot!

[skiracer]

Hi DSteckler

Last week my sister took me down to B&N to look for the books that you recommended "The Wall Street Journal Guide to Understanding Money and Investments," by Kenneth Morris. They didn’t have the book because it was out of print. My sister was able to buy it online as an early birthday present.

Dude looks like a great book, a brand new book for eight dollars. WOW! What a great bargain. Well give me an hour or two to read this.

Any other books you like to share? Thank a lot!

How are you doing with Martin Pring's disc I sent to you. Have you been studying up on the technical aspects of charts and trading?

[JohnHenry]

How are you doing with Martin Pring's disc I sent to you. Have you been studying up on the technical aspects of charts and trading?

Hi Ski

I enjoy the Martin Pring's disc but I have to eat it a few more times to understand what he's saying, so for I get bits and pieces. I left my brother use the disc and he got it the first time around, don’t you hate that. It sucks for me.

Hey I have a quick question about Hans.
I don’t understand why the stock dropped like a rock in the water, the numbers are good. Am I not seeing something that 47 million shares did?

[skiracer]

Hi Ski

I enjoy the Martin Pring's disc but I have to eat it a few more times to understand what he's saying, so for I get bits and pieces. I left my brother use the disc and he got it the first time around, don’t you hate that. It sucks for me.

Hey I have a quick question about Hans.
I don’t understand why the stock dropped like a rock in the water, the numbers are good. Am I not seeing something that 47 million shares did?

It's become a shame that decent companies with strong fundamentals will take a hit like this when they report earnings that are shy of what analysts consensus and expectations are for that reporting period. Trading has become a thing of instant gratification and expectations. If they do not beat, or are better than, or much higher than expectations then this is what happens. Sometimes a strong selloff like this presents a great buying opportunity for entry into a good company after the dust settles. This is just the present mentallity of the market manifesting itself towards an earnings report that did not beat the pants off of analysts expectations. Like dominos, once they start falling it is hard to stop them. Nothing has changed with HANS. Their business model is still great and the product is still the same product. They have been doing so well these last few qtrs. that they have spoiled everyone and the minute they fall a little short this is what happens. Everything peaks sooner or later and usually cannot maintain the same intensity in sales an earnings forever. This is a prime example of how earnings will impact a good stock in a negative way. It should provide a decent entry at a low price as it becomes oversold in the near term.

[IIC]

Stickey...So what do you think about my online school newspaper idea?...I think it's a great idea...I'm serious.

Ski is right about those stocks that miss projections...But more important in the short term is Guidance IMO...that's where IBD needs some work....Happy Malling...Doug(IIC)

[skiracer]

Stickey...So what do you think about my online school newspaper idea?...I think it's a great idea...I'm serious.

Ski is right about those stocks that miss projections...But more important in the short term is Guidance IMO...that's where IBD needs some work....Happy Malling...Doug(IIC)

Doug,
I have to say that I think that your idea is a great one. It would put Stky right in the thick of things and make his name a household word within the student community. It's a chick magnet Stky if you knew how to play it.

[IIC]

Doug,
I have to say that I think that your idea is a great one. It would put Stky right in the thick of things and make his name a household word within the student community. It's a chick magnet Stky if you knew how to play it.

Actually...It is more than a Chick Magnet...If Stickey has higher aspirations than a State College then they want to know what he did besides getting straight "A's"...Personally...I didn't care...For all the letters I got from colleges in HS...Duke and Dartmouth were the first 2 when I was in 11th grade...I knew I didn't qualify for either of those...Plus, Dartmouth doesn't give athletic scholarships anyway...Heck, besides sports...the only thing I had to put on my resume back then was that I was Captain of the Varsity Ditching Team and I had the best lookin' girlfriend in the school...But if I had it all to do over again...it would be different...But one of my 5.132 Sayings To Live By Is "Never Look Back"...And in the end it all worked out anyway...No Regrets...Of course...the Angel in my Pocket and the Crystal Ball never hurt....Doug(IIC)

[ParkTwain]

First learn how a business works, then the overall economy

Before dealing with the stock market, I would strongly recommend that you become a little informed about how a business works (how it makes a profit or a loss) and how the overall economy works. Basic stuff about the political/economic system referred to in the abstract as capitalism.

(I would not recommend reading IBD very often at this point in your career. Its content presupposes a lot of knowledge about the economy and about various kinds of businesses. The newspaper's editorial bent, and political agenda, is also very out front and can get in the way of understanding what you need to know to make a decision about your stocks.)

Learn to differentiate "investing" and "trading." You will have to decide for yourself what these words mean to you (versus all the different definitions you will find out there) and what kind of activity between those two poles you will want to engage in.

You have already gleaned from your readings that stock prices can be understood as very much a function of the "value" of the underlying business and therefore, understanding and even predicting the earnings results of businesses just might be the key to understanding and even predicting the price movements of individual stocks. However, as you have noticed recently (HANS, etc.), this way of approaching buy/sell decisions does not allow you to anticipate completely what will happen to a given stock's price on a given day. (This is, of course, a very great deal to expect from any kind of prognostication.) Understanding the operation of a public corporation involves a lot of background knowledge about various kinds of businesses, and about the economy in general, as well as investigational skills. These investigations are dependent upon access to information, the right kinds of information and available in a timeframe that allows you to make a decision that supports your own financial goals (i.e, your own tolerance for risk, your preferred minimum annual return on investment, etc.). Also, a perennial area of controversy (crossing into the realm of government regulation of the securities markets, which has its own interesting history) among stock market participants is which kinds of information should be publicly available, and WHEN, for a publicly traded corporation. The more you become savvy about this body of information, the better your investing and trading decisions can be. However, you will also read about the "accounting scandals" that broke out since the year 2000 and what they say about the appropriateness and usefulness of the set of information available to market participants. Healthy scepticism about financial information has become more and more prevalent.

However, there is at least one other point of view, one that is more concerned with the actual operating of the stock market as a set of institutions -- with rules, participants, and mechanics of its own -- and as a laboratory for observing human behavior in response to news about business events and economic activity. This other point of view would lead one to observe the patterns of pricing behavior of individual stocks (also groups of "related" stocks, of companies that operate within the same sector of the economy, or across related sectors). After all, regardless of the earnings history of a given stock, if no one wants to actually BUY that stock this month/week/day, that stock's price isn't likely to advance. (As even more of a mindbender, everyone might want to SELL that stock this week for reasons that have nothing to do with the company's earnings performance.) So, you might be led to take notice of the price and volume behaviors of stocks. This leads to the study of stock price charts, usually accompanied by daily volume information. From observing lots of price charts of individual stocks, you will begin to notice certain kinds of patterns in the movements of the prices. This is the beginning of "technical analysis" of stock prices. But before you can glean too much from this general set of information, you should also become somewhat informed about the mechanics of how buy/sell transactions take place in the stock market. Who are the intermediaries, what are their roles, how do they get paid ... etc. All of this matters as to how the price of the stock gets determined when you see it on a screen or later on a chart.

I would also recommend that you read "How I Made $2,000,000 in the Stock Market" by Nicolas Darvas. (Though the title of this book sounds bogus, the content inside is not.) The author was a professional dancer who performed all over the world and decided (this was in the late 1950s) to make his own decisions about buying/selling stocks. He figured out for himself several very basic, but IMPORTANT, truths about how the prices of stocks behave and developed his own rudimentary techniques of understanding, then acting on, the stock price movements that he observed. He describes how he came to these understandings very much in layman's terms. Several realities about the stock market have changed since 1960, yet Darvas's principles hold up very well and are still valid today to the extent that he developed them (for his own purposes, of course). This book can ease you into learning what to watch for as you observe a stock's price during a given day or inspect a longer term stock price-and-volume chart. It is one way to begin thinking like a trader, not an investor.

Here is Darvas's book for sale in paperback at Amazon.com:

http://tinyurl.com/k343v

Another book that I recommend to newbies at thinking about stock charts is "How Charts Can Help You in the Stock Market" by William Jiler. This relatively short book presents actual charts from decades past that illustrate several typical but important principles for observing and understanding the movements of stock prices.

Here is Jiler's book for sale at Amazon.com (hardcover):

http://tinyurl.com/jybuw

Also available in paperback, such as at abebooks.com:

http://tinyurl.com/zg44j

(HEY! There's a Jiler hardcover 1st edition (1962), no dust jacket, available at abebooks.com for $7.50!)

[IIC]

Before dealing with the stock market, I would strongly recommend that you become a little informed about how a business works (how it makes a profit or a loss) and how the overall economy works. Basic stuff about the political/economic system referred to in the abstract as capitalism.

(I would not recommend reading IBD very often at this point in your career. Its content presupposes a lot of knowledge about the economy and about various kinds of businesses. The newspaper's editorial bent, and political agenda, is also very out front and can get in the way of understanding what you need to know to make a decision about your stocks.)

Learn to differentiate "investing" and "trading." You will have to decide for yourself what these words mean to you (versus all the different definitions you will find out there) and what kind of activity between those two poles you will want to engage in.

You have already gleaned from your readings that stock prices can be understood as very much a function of the "value" of the underlying business and therefore, understanding and even predicting the earnings results of businesses just might be the key to understanding and even predicting the price movements of individual stocks. However, as you have noticed recently (HANS, etc.), this way of approaching buy/sell decisions does not allow you to anticipate completely what will happen to a given stock's price on a given day. (This is, of course, a very great deal to expect from any kind of prognostication.) Understanding the operation of a public corporation involves a lot of background knowledge about various kinds of businesses, and about the economy in general, and investigational skills. These investigations are dependent upon access to information, the right kinds of information and available in a timeframe that allows you to make a decision that supports your own financial goals (i.e, your own tolerance for risk, your preferred minimum annual return on investment, etc.). Also, a perennial area of controversy (crossing into the realm of government regulation of the securities markets, which has its own interesting history) among stock market participants is which kinds of information should be publicly available, and WHEN, for a publicly traded corporation. The more you become savvy about this body of information, the better your investing and trading decisions can be. However, you will also read about the "accounting scandals" that broke out since the year 2000 and what they say about the appropriateness and usefulness of the set of information available to market participants. Healthy scepticism about financial information has become more and more prevalent.

However, there is at least one other point of view, one that is more concerned with the actual operating of the stock market as a set of institutions -- with rules, participants, and mechanics of its own -- and as a laboratory for observing human behavior in response to news about business events and economic activity. This other point of view would lead one to observe the patterns of pricing behavior of individual stocks (also groups of "related" stocks, of companies that operate within the same sector of the economy, or across related sectors). After all, regardless of the earnings history of a given stock, if no one wants to actually BUY that stock this month/week/day, that stock's price isn't likely to advance. (As even more of a mindbender, everyone might want to SELL that stock this week for reasons that have nothing to do with the company's earnings performance.) So, you might be led to take notice of the price and volume behaviors of stocks. This leads to the study of stock price charts, usually accompanied by daily volume information. From observing lots of price charts of individual stocks, you will begin to notice ceratin kinds of patterns in the movements of the prices. This is the beginning of "technical analysis" of stock prices. But before you can glean too much from this general set of information, you should also become somewhat informed about the mechanics of how buy/sell transactions take place in the stock market. Who are the intermediaries, what are their roles, how do they get paid ... etc. All of this matters as to how the price of the stock gets determined when you see it on a screen or later on a chart.

I would also recommend that you read "How I Made $2,000,000 in the Stock Market" by Nicolas Darvas. (Though the title of this book sounds bogus, the content inside is not.) The author was a professional dancer who performed all over the world and decided (this was in the late 1950s) to make his own decisions about buying/selling stocks. He figured out for himself several very basic, but IMPORTANT, truths about how the prices of stocks behave and developed his own rudimentary techniques of understanding, then acting on, the stock price movements that he observed. He describes how he came to these understandings very much in layman's terms. Several realities about the stock market have changed since 1960, yet Darvas's principles hold up very well and are still valid today to the extent that he was able to develop them for his own purposes. This book can ease you into learning what to watch for as you observe a stock's price during a given day or inspect a longer term stock price-and-volume chart. It is one way to begin thinking like a trader, not an investor.

Here is Darvas's book for sale in paperback at Amazon.com:

http://tinyurl.com/k343v

Another book that I recommend to newbies at thinking about stock charts is "How Charts Can Help You in the Stock Market" by William Jiler. This relatively short book presents actual charts from decades past that illustrate several typical but important principles for observing and understanding the movements of stock prices.

Here is Jiler's book for sale at Amazon.com (hardcover):

http://tinyurl.com/jybuw

Also available in paperback, such as at abebooks.com:
http://tinyurl.com/zg44j

Geez Park...he's only 14...But I have to agree w/ you...Jiler's book is an EXCELLENT primer for technicians...I have an original 1962 hardcover...That's where I came to realize that William O'Neil didn't discover the Cup w/ Handle pattern in 1966...He simply took Jiler's Platform w/ Saucer pattern and renamed it...At least that's what I think happened...Good book...Doug(IIC)

[ParkTwain]

Well, you guys have been talking to him about IBD as if it means something to him. P/Es, debt ratios, stock splits, convertible floorless debentures, short interest, inverted yield curve, moving averages, accounting practices, breakaway gaps, etc, etc. Not to mention WON's (conservative, small government) political axes to grind; it's mind-numbing! There's no way Sticky's gonna get there anytime soon! Plus, the usefulness of IBD's approach will diminish as you learn more about stock charts. My feeling, obviously, is that the (company earnings, market cycle, and macroeconomic) information-based approach that supports the IBD methodology for making money with stocks has become severely hampered by today's flawed mechanisms (administered by the SEC) for providing actionable accounting-related information to investing individuals. That is a big part of the reason why I have given up on the "fundamentals" approach to operating in the stock market.

Bottom line: Each of us has to learn for ourselves and to our own satisfaction what makes a stock's price rise and fall, then learn to predict same for one's own profit.

Doug, did you ever read Darvas's book?