like i noted a couple of days ago, stec executive management has sold over $400 million worth of stock in 2009 up to august. looks like bartz of yahoo! is doing the same, having sold $3.3 million this year, as reported at breakout performance. in total, yahoo insiders have sold $200m this year, although the majority is icahn selling out. signals! signals!
i've tried the various desktop gadgets available to display stock/index/forex prices, but my favourite is stocks3. get it from the windows gadgets gallery. there is no screen shot of the gadget in action, so i'm sure many people would give it a miss - their loss! btw, don't download stocks or stocks2 as those are just earlier versions.
stocks3 is the most flexible of the gadgets, yet does not take much screen real estate. best of all, it's ad-free and does not link to any commercial services! the configuration window is a little cryptic, as is the how-to guide, but follow the examples and you'll soon have it set up. you can have multiple gadgets, each displaying different data - i use separate ones for my holdings, watch list, fx, etc. another excellent feature is the colour-coded total profit/loss for a snapshot of overall performance (see the "total" line in the portfolio screen shot below).
i bought a some shares of stec towards the end of september, and come october... you know what happened.
a lesson for me to:
- remember that october is a "bad" month for superstitious/historical reasons
- check the economic/financial announcement calendar
- e.g. via yahoo or bloomberg
- or by adding events google finance to my personal calendar by clicking on the "add to my calendars" link
- check for "insider" trading for clues, e.g. at google, yahoo or msn.
had i done all the above, i would not have gone in. and i would have realized that the ceo, president, etc. had been selling, selling, selling. that should've been a strong signal for me!
i use excel extensively to track my investments, with web queries to get data from msn/google, vba code for trending and so on. i posted a how-to using web queries before, to get historical price data on one company. i have another web-query using msn to get the open/close/last price on a list of companies:
http://moneycentral.msn.com/investor/external/excel/quotes.asp?SYMBOL=["QUOTE","Enter stock symbol separated by commas"]the input "symbol=" is an alphabetically sorted, comma-separated list of stock/fund symbols. i wanted a way to create this list automatically from the list of my holdings, which is sorted chronologically.
the web-query does not require the list to sorted. but i use
vlookup to extract the data i need, and vlookup has this requirement: "by default, the table must be sorted in an ascending order". bummer.well, now i have a solution, courtesy of the pointy haired dilbert's post, sorting text in excel using formulas. his is an excellent method without resorting to vba programming.
the key is using
countif. for example, sorting the series i,n,v,e,s,t would give e,i,n,s,t,v. notice that countif(series,"<i") would return 1 (i.e. second in the sorted series), countif(series,"<n") is 2 (third), countif(series,"<v") is 5 (last), countif(series,"<e") is 0 (first), etc. in other words, countif returns the position in the sorted list. all that's left to do is then use vlookup to display the sorted list.here's the code sample using google spreadsheets, but it's the same for excel:
the caveats are:
- the sort order column must be before the data to be sorted - it can't be anywhere else.
- the vlookup formula calculates based on the offset of the first row of data, in the sample, i use the header row + 1, but in excel 2007, you can use the table name, e.g.
row() - row(table_name) + 1)
now, every time i add a buy a new stock, the sorting and lookups are automatic, and i can simply refresh the data connections to calculate my positions.
my portfolio is quite heavy on tech stocks, but reading posts from dr. eric jackson makes the think twice. tech stocks have not been performing, yet for a select few companies, executive compensation is outrageous.
from a post about hp's president/ceo/chairman, h-p hurd's pay troubling:"for 2008, hurd's total compensation reached $43 million, which made him the fourth highest paid ceo in america for 2008. hurd's total compensation increased 73% from his $25 million in 2007, even though hp's stock price declined 29% in 2008... 2008 was also a year in which these same leaders imposed mandatory 10% pay cuts for other executives and 5% cuts for the rest of hp's workforce."
and in a similar vein, over at yahoo!, bartz's pay package egregious:
"ceo carol bartz didn't get the "boatloads of cash" for her shareholders from microsoft as she vowed in May, but she'll take home a boatload of cash herself out of yahoo! for her work in 2009.a review of her total compensation plan reveals that bartz is on track to make $20 million to $30 million this year in cash and stock"these companies are clearly not lead by "leaders" but rather "managers"... who mostly manage their own compensation. i've yet to see any visionary innovations from either, not to mention stock performance.
the shock continues when comparing their compensation to the avg annual total compensation of other tech ceos. look at the market/thought/innovation leaders - eric schmidt of google $500k; jeff bezoz at amazon $1.3m; steve balmer of microsoft $1.3m; steve jobs of apple $1 [without "k" or "m" suffix, make no mistake!]
and the moral of the story, imho? only first generation leaders are true leaders, who build their companies - thereby indirectly building their net worth (and only indirectly). the others are clearly out to make as much money as possible, screwing shareholders and employees. amazingly, even getting fired or selling out does not matter to them (cf. carly fiorina's $40m golden parachute and the recent demise of ross perot's legacy of eds and perot systems)
just realized that with ie8, the picture "lighbox" is right aligned. with firefox and chrome, the lightbox is centred, which is the desired behaviour. can't be bothered to figure this out.
i've stopped blogging for over a month now! can't believe it - been busy, but i've also run out of steam. from what i can tell, i've got no audience anyway (i've no friends)! :)
- the markets are rebounding to such an extent that i am hesitant to buy, but worse than that, am also hesitant to sell - despite reaching some of my sell targets.
- ditto on the aussie dollar, which is at an all time high - so i've stopped my dual account investment at hsbc too.
- local (asian) markets are also up, and i've already started disposing of some mutual funds...
i've been busy lately, and have nothing new to say, but i do note the sector map is more red than green after this weeks rally.
seems that the "market" is very sensitive nowadays. on the slightest whiff of bad news, we'll have another downward spiral...
in recent news, microsoft has inked a deal with yahoo! for microsoft's bing to provide search results for yahoo. yahoo will make 88% of the revenue from microsoft via searches from their site.
seems like yahoo wants to re-make itself as nothing but a marketing-machine and advertising sales force. if yahoo really forgets its technology roots, then imho, this the beginning of the end for yahoo (or perhaps the beginning can be traced back to the "replacement" of jerry yang with the foul-mouthed bartz).
sure, sales and marketing is important, but it cannot be a core competency. jeff bezos realized that amazon was about their technology platform, not books. google innovates with cool software from google earth to google mail. and microsoft... well, 'nuff said.
already i dislike yahoo mail, yahoo finance and the other yahoo tools. with low switching costs, what if others think like me?
yesterday, i decided to sell some of my holdings in my sogotrade account.
almost 30% returns from the time i bought it! but this return represents a measly $30, sigh. still, one has to start somewhere right?
and, if i had waited till today, i'd be slightly better off - but timing the market is not worth the effort, and i have hit my profit-taking target anyway.
seems like for the period i've been investing, it would be hard to make a loss - but this non-investor still can! believe it or not, my measly profit so far won't even cover losses on other holdings! haven't figured out an exit strategy for this situation yet. i dare not sell, instead, i watch it tumble! :0
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