Friday, September 12, 2008

How to Make Money in Difficult Times

I try to vary the sources we link to but, damn, Gaffen is good.
From MarketBeat:
The performance of markets this week brings to mind the cliché about not knowing where you’re going, but making great time in getting there.

To say investors are confused is putting it mildly. Investors are coming through a week where financial shares have been thrashed, despite the insistence that the fundamentals do not justify the skittishness. Volatility rose sharply, and the Dow industrials traded in a wide range every day of the week. A long-term investor might see a good opening to buy shares, but if those shares then drop another 20% in a day, that’s a confidence-buster....

...This environment is good news for a trader with the agility of Spider-Man and the mathematical chops of Steven Hawking, but for everyone else, it can be frustrating. “When you have such volatility it’s a great environment for traders, assuming you’re smart enough to be on the right side of a trade, but it’s much harder for everyone else,”>>>MORE
Which is exactly what I was getting at in the last post (FSLR) with:
...I want to make plain that Climateer Investing was not intended to be a trading tips blog but:

a) In this market it is one of the few things that seems to be working. You have to be nimble, it is a bear market, that means the trend will tend to be down.

b) It's something I've been doing for a while. At minimum, I'll try to steer you clear of bankruptcies, frauds and other really bad things....
Just so you're under no illusions that I actually am Steven Hawking, in August of last year we were quite pleased with a one week trade of First Solar that returned 21.8%. The stock then moved up another couple hundred points. This is from a post two months into that move:
...meanwhile Climateer will be dining on crow this evening....
Another proof that the rocket scientist biz is not clamoring for my skills is the fact that I caught myself humming this song when the market closed (thank goodness the door was also closed):