Livestock Trading Thread: Baa or better

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Business, Finance, and Careers > Livestock Trading Thread: Baa or better

Strict 9: Jun 20, 2001; by Y Kant Ozma Post

Not sure what thread to post this in, but I figured people here might have a good idea. For tracking returns across multiple brokers, what's the best tool to use? A simple spreadsheet? I'd like to compare the returns of the various accounts I have.

# ¿ Feb 15, 2010 15:13

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# ¿ May 3, 2024 07:27

Strict 9: Jun 20, 2001; by Y Kant Ozma Post

Dr. Eldarion posted:

I'm looking for a website and it seems like there should be hundreds, but I can't seem to find even one. All I want to do is plug in all the stocks I own and how much of them I have, and see a historical graph of their combined value, perhaps something similar to this, showing a total and breaking it out by each individual value in that total.

TD Ameritrade doesn't appear to do it, and I can't find any websites that do after searching for around 10 minutes. Does this really not exist, or do I just suck at searching?

Edit: Yahoo Finance offers this data in CSV form, so I could throw something together that does this if I have to, but I can't believe it hasn't already been done.

Heh, funny, I was looking for that exact same thing last week and couldn't find one so I started programming my own. Not many free sites seem to have an option for that, and none of the (discount) brokers I've used have one either.

# ¿ Mar 11, 2010 16:09

Strict 9: Jun 20, 2001; by Y Kant Ozma Post

As they say, markets are never wrong - opinions are.

# ¿ Jun 2, 2010 20:17

Strict 9: Jun 20, 2001; by Y Kant Ozma Post

Dr. Jackal posted:

P/E suggests GTFO? and I was wondering if I should be going back into NFLX even though it's P/E is around 50 again.

I keep trying to get into NFLX as I think it's a good growth story, but I've been burned twice by bad entry points.

I'm tempted by one of it's competitors, Coinstar (CSTR), though it's a bit too far above it's moving averages for my tastes. It's shown amazing strength even after its gap up though.

# ¿ Jun 4, 2010 02:33

Strict 9: Jun 20, 2001; by Y Kant Ozma Post

Hobologist posted:

Unless salesforce.com can hold off competition the way Amazon and google did, I really don't see how they can expand their market niche that much and that quickly. But I haven't made a close examination of the business.

I shorted Coinstar last year, and right now I'm so glad I covered it in, I think, January. As I said at the time, Coinstar bought out its co-owners of Redbox for a price that implies about $300 million for the entire company, so it interests me that the Redbox seems to be valued by the market at about $1.4 billion, since Coinstar has certainly not in that time put another $1.1 billion into it. They have been expanding, but although Redbox division sales have improved dramatically, margins have not, so I'm not sure when or even if Redbox will generate excessive returns (as presumably their co-owner suspected when they agreed to be bought out). In the last two quarters their return on enterprise value (current market cap plus all debt) was 2.15% and their earnings yield (1/PE) was 1.1%. So, again, the market is pricing in a lot of growth or a lot of margin improvement, and if Coinstar can't pull it off the action will certainly be...interesting. And Coinstar also has January 2012 puts.

Good observations on Coinstar. I'm also worried expectations might be high at this point. But their growth is very impressive - 23% market share in DVD rentals, up from 15% a year ago, and 22% same store (or I guess kiosk) sales growth in the first quarter.

I always assumed it wouldn't be able to compete well with Netflix, but the increasing presence of their boxes not only in grocery stores but in Wal-Marts, McDonalds, etc I think really increases their usage.

As for CRM, I've never really liked that stock, but I do think they have decent protection against competitors in that once you get data into a system like that, and get people used to it, it gets very hard to move away from it even if you hate it. I know I've seen that hundreds of times with companies and their customer databases.

# ¿ Jun 4, 2010 18:21

Strict 9: Jun 20, 2001; by Y Kant Ozma Post

Tom Rakewell posted:

It has been said here again and again, but commenting on undercapitalization is not making fun of you for not being super rich or whatever. Yes, not being able to meet a $2500 balance means you're severely undercapitalized (add a 0 and most people would still call you undercapitalized), but don't take it personally. Trading commissions operated on a fixed cost basis and not a percentage basis, so trading with a smaller sum of money means commissions eat up a much bigger percentage of your return. This makes trading for a profit, which is difficult enough, significantly more difficult, because you have to make a greater percentage on each trade in order to get some returns.

Just curious what people feel is a reasonable percent to spend on commission?

# ¿ Jun 8, 2010 17:18

Strict 9: Jun 20, 2001; by Y Kant Ozma Post

The financial company I work for is probably getting 50 calls and emails a day about people wanting to buy BP, same as people wanting to buy bank stocks last year and housing stocks the year before. Because they're "cheap". Like how BP was cheap at 50. And 45. And 40. And 35.

It just doesn't make sense to me to try to invest in such an obviously damaged company. Why not invest in an oil company that , oh I don't know, is killing the market right now? Like PXD.

# ¿ Jun 18, 2010 03:46

Strict 9: Jun 20, 2001; by Y Kant Ozma Post

I work for a financial newsletter publisher, Cabot Heritage, and we have a crapload of information on our site. The education section is kind of a navigation nightmare but there's a lot of good content in there. If you're looking for some stock ideas there's also a favorite stocks section and a newsletter that's sent out a few times a week.

http://www.cabot.net

# ¿ Jul 8, 2010 15:20

Strict 9: Jun 20, 2001; by Y Kant Ozma Post

Haha, actually, we do always seem to need quality web copywriters.

The sad thing is that aesthetically ugly sales pages like that work pretty well, at least in the tests we've done. Though that page is a bit uglier than most due to issues with our CMS and marketers using WYSIWYG editors.

The site was designed by someone who last bothered updating their web design skills 10 years ago, so you're dead on with that remark. I'm slowly trying to update the site to make it less offensive on the eyes. We just *gasp* started using proper HTML in our email newsletters!

Anyway, if you can get past all that, there is some decent content underneath.

# ¿ Jul 8, 2010 17:02

Strict 9: Jun 20, 2001; by Y Kant Ozma Post

Plastic Jesus posted:

Hard to say in which direction the market will react, but I doubt it will be a very large move either way.

Yeah, unless you're talking about a day trade type of thing, news from Apple events rarely moves the stock more than a percent or two. All of that is already built into the stock before the announcement. There's more uncertainty here of course since no one really knows what they're going to talk about, but unless they issue a recall I don't see it reacting much (and even with a recall it'd probably just bounce back a few days later).

# ¿ Jul 15, 2010 15:17

Strict 9: Jun 20, 2001; by Y Kant Ozma Post

MrBigglesworth posted:

Is the BIDU train ever going to run out of steam? Since Dec it has risen ~$74/share accounting for the split.

They just had a 10 for one split a couple months ago on May 12, was around $770 a share. Price was around $74 ish at the split and now the stock is up $12/share from that point in just less than 3 months now at $86 and change.

They seem to have very little in the way of Debt and just keep hauling in income.

I'm long on BIDU, got in at 70. I think the fairly strong break through 80 shows some good strength. Here's what my advisory service says (and they were lucky enough to get in at 32):

quote:

Chasing after all Baidu�s users, naturally, are advertisers. At the end of the second quarter, Baidu had about 254,000 active online advertising customers, representing a 25.1% increase from the corresponding period in 2009. Revenue per online advertising customer for the second quarter was approximately $1,106, a 38.9% increase from the corresponding period in 2009.

And Baidu�s costs are falling! Traffic acquisition cost for the quarter was 9.7% of total revenues, compared to 16.0% in the corresponding period in 2009. And bandwidth costs were 3.5% of total revenues, compared to 4.6% in the corresponding period in 2009. Meanwhile, cash is growing. At the end of the quarter, the company had $872 million on hand. The result was an obese profit margin of 44.9% in the second quarter, up from 38.6% in the first quarter. That�s a profitable business!

Finally, there�s the chart. BIDU has been trading since 2005. Like most stocks, it topped in 2007 and bottomed at the end of 2008. It returned to its old high at the end of 2009, and broke out to new highs in February of this year, just around the time news spread that Google was exiting China. From May through July it built a solid base with resistance at 78, and last week, following a great earnings announcement, it broke out of that base and began another advance. With a healthy bull market at its back (the one remaining question today), this stock can go much farther.

# ¿ Aug 5, 2010 02:20

Strict 9: Jun 20, 2001; by Y Kant Ozma Post

Oof, GMCR shares down 17% on an SEC probe.

# ¿ Sep 29, 2010 16:51

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# ¿ May 3, 2024 07:27

Strict 9: Jun 20, 2001; by Y Kant Ozma Post

fougera posted:

I don't have a complaint about their customer service, trade desk, etc., but their applications and research tools are very subpar.

Yeah, I opened an account and everything before discovering how horrid their interface was. I opened up an account at Tradeking instead, which is much, much better and well worth the extra two bucks per trade.

# ¿ Dec 6, 2010 22:41

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