The market has taken a beating lately! The Dow was down another 64 points today and the S&P was down almost 6 points.
My positions finished up (just a bit), with NTE leading the way up 1.77%
I still have a good amount of cash in my ING account and my Scottrade account and I need to invest this soon!
I was searching through stocks today at work (like usual) and came up with short list to look further into: TIF, IIG, KRB, NCC, ENH, APL, BHBC, CSE, KCS, CREE, AWC, MSS, ORB, CLFC, SIRF, DITC, TRST.
These are some that popped up, but I haven't done any research. The only good thing about a down trending market is that I might have enough time to find some stocks I like and buy them before they move up.
I'm also looking more into options and I might open up a second trading account for options (Scottrade gives only limited option capabilities). The one thing I want to look into is: buy an in-the-money (ITM) call on the QQQQ (LEAPS- I'm looking into January 06 or 07) and then sell OTM (out-the-money) calls that go out 2 months or so. I would do this every two months or so (maybe not in times of high volatility) and gain the premiums. I'll post more about this, once I research a bit more (this might be awhile).
I still haven't done my taxes- maybe soon.
Betting: I'm definitely only looking at two games this round because I have no idea about the others. Illinois (the top ranked team in the country, only one loss) is playing the underdogs of the tournament Wisconsin-Milwaukee. This team has defeated two lower seeds and they look pretty good, but I'm not sure if they are a match against the top team.
The other game is North Carolina (generally the second best team) against Villanova. N. Carolina has been the most impressive team because they have blown out their opponents in both games so far (maybe their opponents weren't too good... but it's still a blow out)
They have a great team, great players, good big men (Sean May) and have been scoring in the 90's lately.
I think if they remain confident, they can take Villanova.
Am I confident of these two games? Not really, because anything can happen at this point.
If I put a $100 two team parlay (so both teams need to win; I'm using $100 just for ease) then I would get back $133. Oh, this is good to point out: let's say I wanted to do this parlay, I should have done this yesterday because then the payout would have been over $150. This means more people have been betting Illinois to win so the payout goes down.
If I split the $100 between the two: $50 on both teams, these are the payouts.
Illinois winning = $57
N. Carolina winning = $58
Total = $115
So by taking on the extra risk of needing both teams to win, you get an extra $18, which comes out to about a +15.65% return when comparing $133 to $115
As of right now, I'm not sure what I will do. Right now I'm leaning towards the safe side and might place $10 on each team to win. We'll see...
