Friday, May 20, 2005

Discipline

The markets finished a tad bit higher today. My portfolio finished down a little for today, mainly because of a sell-off in LB (it's been acting funny lately). FRX had a nice day finishing +1.75% and it's up 11% since I've bought it (4/27/05).

ARO posted earnings in-line (0.15/share) and revenues rose 26%, but did not meet expectations. They also issued downside guidance. I'm going to see how the stock reacts tomorrow. Revenues are increasing fairly fast, but management are not hitting the numbers recently. The things I keep in mind: they have good products and I don't buy the saying that AEOS (American Eagle) and ANF (Abercrombie & Fitch) are taking sales. Plus they are still a growth company considering the fact that they don't have nearly as many stores as AEOS and ANF.
The negative: teen retail is a hard business where fashion changes incredibly fast. There's a few more things I don't like about them as well.

I wanted to write a post on the psychology of investing and discipline. These topics could fill volumes (and probably do) so I didn't know where to start. Instead I found two links. The first one has a few links about the psychology of investing. It's from the site About.com, which I think is an excellent site. The second article is actually a speech given at Wharton by Robert Rodriguez. I thought it was a good speech with discipline as the central theme.

Random Things
Net Worth: I haven't posted an update lately, but it should be around the same levels ($23k).

Mad Money: I ended up watching this Cramer show again! Someone needs to tell me/give me the over/under on Cramer having a heart attack on air. He was jumping around, sweating, almost passing out (I think he said he was sick), and yelling. Anyways, he did list three trading stocks for the next 48 hours. Basically he said buy these 3 stocks and sell them within 48 hours: AMR, LUV, JBLU. All are airliners and Cramer thinks they will move up tomorrow and/or the next day because of today's news- U.S. Airways and America West are merging.

I finished the 419 pages of the Quantitative book for the CFA. Fun read (just kidding). Now I just need to go back, take notes, and answer the problems. It wasn't too bad; I covered all the info in my statistics classes.

Job Hunt: I haven't applied to anything lately, but I'm going to spend tomorrow looking for a bit.

New site added: Free Money Finance. A great amount of finance advice. I also added Trader Dan's site since it seems we're almost in the same boat.

Quote: It's not the strongest of the species that survive; nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I've had AAI on and off for the last six months, buying in when it's been down and profit-taking when it has been up... this week has been phenomenal for AAI and I sold it off on Friday near close. Definitely didn't hear Cramer give the advice but I think anyone who pays any attention to airlines could've said the same.