Location: Westport, Bogey's Grill & Tap Room, Main Street & Rt 57.
5:30PM - Meet in the bar
6:00PM - Dinner upstairs as we discuss markets, trends, portfolio, and award winner from last month.
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Sunday, October 12, 2008
Oct 1st - Meeting Review -
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=p4P2Qbq7qqC1UZpy1VImeAw
The group meeting was unique this month, perhaps due to the recent stock market turbulence or perhaps due to a changing schedule which forced us to move the meeting from two weeks ago until October 1st. Our original cast was supported by Greg Pinyan, Mark Juviler, Casey Allen & Tim West with the rest being new members to the monthly meeting process and concept.
The meeting ended up being a discussion of the presentation given by me, Tim West, a year ago where I outlined the bear market that would unfold in the US stock market. The bear market was very much underway at more than a 20% decline, however, after the meeting the carnage accelerated.
Tim discussed the extremely similar personality of the stock market moves from the past to present and how it implied we would fall substantially further. (I'm sensing at this time, however, that the lowest prices may have been seen last Friday, particularly at 3PM, when put volumes showed up in their extremes, coupled with 75+ readings in VIX - for further details - go to http://shorttermtradingideas.blogspot.com )
The meeting also covered questions about the Presidential election: Who do you think will win? (Note that is not the same as "Who do you want to win?"). The group generally believed that Obama would win (as I recall).
Kudos goes to Jim Sullivan for winning last month with his forecast for a drop in the price of crude oil. Jim won with a stunning 5.2R return for his pick, trouncing the next 2 traders by a margin of 2R. Stan Katz came in 2nd with a 3.3R return for his short EuroCurrency and Bob Gifford nailed down a 3.1R return in his Long Home Depot idea. Overall the portfolio was up 2.2% for the month and is up 36% for the year so far. Our largest monthly closing loss was 3.5% back in June and our second worst month was -3.0% in March. Each of the last two losing months was followed by extremely large profitable months. The results exclude leverage assumptions, commissions, slippage and the impact of having actual orders in the marketplace, particularly stop orders.
Either way - the results speak volumes for the diversity of the ideas, the money management principles and the concept that you can make money without incessant amounts of trading and management of positions. I would like to give awards to the best ideas presented at the beginning of the year based a variety of criteria. These awards will hopefully be given at each monthly meeting based on a 1 year holding period assumption. This takes a lot of work, but it may show whether or not we have had skill/luck at picking investments for the longer haul. My intuition has me leaning towards the concept that we can pick up on trends for the 3-month to 6-month time frame. Again, just my intuition here.
Hope to see you all again at our next meeting.
Shall we continue with the 2nd Wednesday of the month again for the next meeting? November 12th, 5:30PM at Bogey's in Westport.
The group meeting was unique this month, perhaps due to the recent stock market turbulence or perhaps due to a changing schedule which forced us to move the meeting from two weeks ago until October 1st. Our original cast was supported by Greg Pinyan, Mark Juviler, Casey Allen & Tim West with the rest being new members to the monthly meeting process and concept.
The meeting ended up being a discussion of the presentation given by me, Tim West, a year ago where I outlined the bear market that would unfold in the US stock market. The bear market was very much underway at more than a 20% decline, however, after the meeting the carnage accelerated.
Tim discussed the extremely similar personality of the stock market moves from the past to present and how it implied we would fall substantially further. (I'm sensing at this time, however, that the lowest prices may have been seen last Friday, particularly at 3PM, when put volumes showed up in their extremes, coupled with 75+ readings in VIX - for further details - go to http://shorttermtradingideas.blogspot.com )
The meeting also covered questions about the Presidential election: Who do you think will win? (Note that is not the same as "Who do you want to win?"). The group generally believed that Obama would win (as I recall).
Kudos goes to Jim Sullivan for winning last month with his forecast for a drop in the price of crude oil. Jim won with a stunning 5.2R return for his pick, trouncing the next 2 traders by a margin of 2R. Stan Katz came in 2nd with a 3.3R return for his short EuroCurrency and Bob Gifford nailed down a 3.1R return in his Long Home Depot idea. Overall the portfolio was up 2.2% for the month and is up 36% for the year so far. Our largest monthly closing loss was 3.5% back in June and our second worst month was -3.0% in March. Each of the last two losing months was followed by extremely large profitable months. The results exclude leverage assumptions, commissions, slippage and the impact of having actual orders in the marketplace, particularly stop orders.
Either way - the results speak volumes for the diversity of the ideas, the money management principles and the concept that you can make money without incessant amounts of trading and management of positions. I would like to give awards to the best ideas presented at the beginning of the year based a variety of criteria. These awards will hopefully be given at each monthly meeting based on a 1 year holding period assumption. This takes a lot of work, but it may show whether or not we have had skill/luck at picking investments for the longer haul. My intuition has me leaning towards the concept that we can pick up on trends for the 3-month to 6-month time frame. Again, just my intuition here.
Hope to see you all again at our next meeting.
Shall we continue with the 2nd Wednesday of the month again for the next meeting? November 12th, 5:30PM at Bogey's in Westport.
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
