Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Everything about Windows 7
From .iso torrent file, to hash checksum for the .iso, to loader info, to product keys!
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Somali sea gangs lure investors at pirate lair
Somali sea gangs lure investors at pirate lair
http://www.reuters.com/article/wtUSInvestingNews/idUSTRE5B01Z920091201?sp=true
Friday, November 27, 2009
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Investor's Corner: Cut Stock Losses At 7%-8% In All Cases
Investor's Corner: Cut Stock Losses At 7%-8% In All Cases
- Victor Reklaitis
- On 6:32 pm EST, Tuesday November 24, 2009
As basketball season starts up again, countless coaches are no doubt shouting out this principle to their teams during practice: Defense wins championships.
In that same vein, knowing how to play defense is really what makes for a winning investment portfolio.
You can't always be on target with every stock that you pick.
But if you've got a sound strategy for selling losers, then you'll be ahead of the game.
"The whole secret to winning big in the stock market is not to be right all the time, but to lose the least amount possible when you're wrong," says IBD founder and Chairman William J. O'Neil in his book "How to Make Money in Stocks."
O'Neil adds that it's easy to tell when you're wrong. It's when a stock falls below the price that you paid for it, he says.
"Each point 20hat your favorite brainchild falls below your cost increases both the chance that you're wrong and the price that you're going to pay for being wrong," he says in his book.
So, always cut your losses at 7% or 8% from your purchase price, regardless of circumstances.
Research into the most successful stocks has found that market winners rarely fall more than 8% from their proper buy points.
Importance Of Cutting Losses
Moreover, as losses extend beyond 8%, the rebound needed to get back to break-even just keeps getting bigger and bigger.
An 8% loss requires a gain of just 8.7%. But a 20% loss needs a 25% gain to get even, and a 33% loss requires a 50% rise.
It gets even worse after that. A 50% loss needs a 100% gain to get back to break-even, and a 75% loss means that you need a 300% rise.
Another point 15 keep in mind is that you don't have to wait for a loss to hit 7% or 8% before you sell.
For example, you may want to get out at a 3% loss when the overall market is under distribution.
O'Neil notes: "If you're in a bear market like 2008 and you buy any stocks at all, you might get only a few 10% or 15% gains, so I'd move quickly to cut every single loss automatically at 3%, with no exceptions."
Investors might want to consider following a 3-1 ratio for taking profits vs. cutting losses.
That means if you're taking some 20% to 25% gains, then cut your losses at 7% or 8%. But if you're taking profits of just 10% to 15%, then get out at a 3% loss.
What about if you pyramided into a stock (which means buying some initial shares, then adding smaller amounts as the stock rises)? How does the 7%-8% sell rule apply in that case?
You have a choice if you bought shares in increments. You can scale out, selling at a 7% or 8% loss for each purchase, or just sell all of your shares at once.
Mindray Medical's (NYSE:MR - News) action in the summer of 2008 offers an example of how to minimize losses using the 7%-8% sell rule.
The stock broke out of a base, moving decisively beyond a buy point 15f 42.10 (point 1).
But quickly after that, in early August 2008, Mindray dropped more than 8% below that buy point 16oint 2).
An investor with a sound sell strategy would have sold all shares at that time -- no hesitation.
Cutting your losses then would have prevented further pain. By November 2008, the maker of medical gear had plunged even more, hitting a low of 12.31.
© Investor's Business Daily, Inc. 2009. All Rights Reserved.
Monday, November 9, 2009
Monday, November 2, 2009
Paper: Technical Analysis Around the World
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1181367
Abstract:
Technical analysis is not consistently profitable in the 49 countries that comprise the Morgan Stanley Capital Index once data snooping bias is accounted for. There is some evidence that technical trading rules perform better in emerging markets than developed markets, which is consistent with the finding of previous studies that these markets are less efficient, but this result is not strong. While we cannot rule out the possibility that technical analysis compliments other market timing techniques or that trading rules we do not test are profitable, we do show that over 5,000 trading rules do not add value beyond what may be expected by chance when used in isolation.
Keywords: Technical Analysis, Quantitative, Market Timing
YouTube: Technical Analysis walkthrough videos
http://www.youtube.com/user/Daytradervideos
PDF: Technical Analysis Plain and Simple 3rd Edition (2010)
http://www.filedownloadfull.com/forums/f7/technical-analysis-plain-simple-charting-markets-934961/
Also, as a general reference site, there's a whole bunch of eBooks available for download here:
http://www.filedownloadfull.com/forums/f7/
Saturday, October 31, 2009
ChartPatterns.com
Great site that not only has examples and tutorials on chart patterns (pennant, ascending triangles, etc.) but also a 'stock of the week' examples that outline what, and what to do with it.
Friday, October 30, 2009
Dissecting Leveraged ETF Returns
http://www.investopedia.com/articles/exchangetradedfunds/07/leveraged-etf.asp
Dissecting Leveraged ETF Returns
Leveraged exchange-traded funds are a relatively new and unfamiliar product to most investors, but they could be the ticket investors need to bring in increased returns.
These funds are designed to deliver a greater return than through holding regular long or short positions. In this article we explain what leveraged ETFs are, and how they work in both good and bad market conditions.
About Leveraged ETFs
Exchange-traded funds are traded on a stock exchange. They allow individual investors to benefit from economies of scale by spreading administration and transaction costs over a large number of investors.
Leveraged funds have been available since at least the early 1990s. The first leveraged ETFs were introduced in the summer of 2006, after undergoing almost three years of Securities And Exchange Commission (SEC) review. Leveraged ETFs mirror an index fund, but they use borrowed capital in addition to investor equity to provide a higher level of investment exposure. Typically, a leveraged ETF will maintain a $2 exposure to the index for every $1 of investor capital. The fund’s goal is to have future appreciation of the investments made with borrowed capital exceed the cost of the capital itself.
Maintaining Asset Value
The first investment funds that were listed on stock exchanges were called closed-end funds. Their problem was that pricing of the fund’s shares was set by supply and demand, and would often deviate from the value of the assets in the fund, or net asset value (NAV). This unpredictable pricing confused and deterred many would-be investors. (For more on closed-end funds, see Open Your Eyes To Closed-End Funds and Uncovering Closed-End Funds.)
ETFs solved this problem by allowing management to create and redeem shares as needed. This made the fund open-ended rather than closed-ended, and created an arbitrage opportunity for management that helps keep share prices in line with the underlying NAV. Because of this, even ETFs with very limited trading volume have share prices that are almost identical to their NAV.
Note: ETFs are almost always fully invested; the constant creation and redemption of shares does have the potential to increase transaction costs because the fund must resize its investment portfolio. These transaction costs are borne by all investors in the fund.
Index Exposure
Leveraged ETFs respond to share creation and redemption by increasing or reducing their exposure to the underlying index using derivatives. The derivatives most commonly used are index futures, equity swaps and index options.
The typical holdings of a leveraged index fund would be a large amount of cash invested in short-term securities, and a smaller but highly volatile portfolio of derivatives. The cash is used to meet any financial obligations that arise from losses on the derivatives.
There are also inverse-leveraged ETFs that sell the same derivatives short. These funds profit when the index declines and take losses when the index rises. (To learn more, see Can you short-sell ETFs? and our Short Selling Tutorial.)
Daily Rebalancing
Maintaining a constant leverage ratio, typically two-times the amount, is complex. Fluctuations in the price of the underlying index change the value of the fund’s assets, and this requires the fund to change the total amount of index exposure.
Example: Suppose a fund has $100 million of assets and $200 million of index exposure. The index rises 1% in the first day of trading, giving the firm $2 million in profits. (Assume no expenses in this example.) The fund now has $102 million of assets and must increase (in this case, double) its index exposure to $204 million. Maintaining a constant leverage ratio allows the fund to immediately reinvest trading gains. This constant adjustment, also known as rebalancing, is how the fund is able to provide double the exposure to the index at any point in time, even if the index has gained 50% or lost 50% recently. Without rebalancing, the fund’s leverage ratio would change every day and the fund’s returns, as compared to the underlying index, would be unpredictable. |
In declining markets, however, rebalancing can be problematic. Reducing the index exposure allows the fund to survive a downturn and limits future losses, but also locks in trading losses and leaves the fund with a smaller asset base.
Example: Consider a week in which the index loses 1% every day for four days in a row, and then gains +4.1% on the fifth day, which allows it to recover all of its losses. How would a two-times leveraged ETF based on this index perform during this same period? |
Day | Index Open | Index Close | Index Return | ETF Open | ETF Close | ETF Return |
Monday | 100.00 | 99.00 | -1.00% | 100.00 | 98.00 | -2.00% |
Tuesday | 99.00 | 98.01 | -1.00% | 98.00 | 96.04 | -2.00% |
Wednesday | 98.01 | 97.03 | -1.00% | 96.04 | 94.12 | -2.00% |
Thursday | 97.03 | 96.06 | -1.00% | 94.12 | 92.24 | -2.00% |
Friday | 96.06 | 100.00 | +4.10% | 92.24 | 99.80 | +8.20% |
By the end of the week, our index had returned to its starting point, but our leveraged ETF was still down slightly (0.2%). This is not a rounding error. It is a result of the proportionally smaller asset base in the leveraged fund, which requires a larger return, 8.42% in fact, to return to its original level.
This effect is small in this example, but can become significant over longer periods of time in very volatile markets. The larger the percentage drops are, the larger the differences will be.
Note: Simulating daily rebalancing is mathematically simple. All that needs to be done is to double the daily index return. What is considerably more complex is estimating the impact of fees on the daily returns of the portfolio, which we'll cover in the next section.
Performance and Fees
Suppose an investor analyzes monthly S&P 500 stock returns for the past three years and finds that the average monthly return is 0.9%, and the standard deviation of those returns is 2.0%.
Assuming that future returns conform to recent historical averages, the two-times leveraged ETF based upon this index will be expected to return twice the expected return with twice the expected volatility, (i.e. 1.8% monthly return with a 4% standard deviation). Most of this gain would come in the form of capital gains rather than dividends.
However, this 1.8% return is before fund expenses. Leveraged ETFs incur expenses in three categories: management, interest and transactions.
The management expense is the fee levied by the fund’s management company. This fee is detailed in the prospectus and can be as much as 1% of the fund’s assets every year. These fees cover both marketing and fund administration costs. Interest expenses are costs related to holding derivative securities. All derivatives have an interest rate built into their pricing. This rate, known as the risk-free rate, is very close to the short-term rate on
Interest and transaction expenses can be hard to identify and calculate because they are not individual line items, but instead a gradual reduction of fund profitability. One approach that works well is to compare a leveraged ETF’s performance against its underlying index for several months and examine the differences between expected and actual returns.
Example: A two-times leveraged small-cap ETF has assets of $500 million, and the appropriate index is trading for $50. The fund purchases derivatives to simulate $1 billion of exposure to the appropriate small-cap index, or 20 million shares, using a combination of index futures, index options and equity swaps. The fund maintains a large cash position to offset potential declines in the index futures and equity swaps. This cash is invested in short-term securities, and helps offset the interest costs associated with these derivatives. Every day, the fund rebalances its index exposure based upon fluctuations in the price of the index and on share creation and redemption obligations. During the year, this fund generates $33 million of expenses, as detailed below. |
Interest Expenses | $25 million | 5% of $500 million |
Transaction Expenses | $3 million | 0.3% of $1 billion |
Management Expenses | $5 million | $1% of $500 million |
Total Expenses | $33 million | - - |
In one year, the index increases 10%, to $55, and the 20 million shares are now worth $1.1 billion. The fund has generated capital gains and dividends of $100 million and incurred $33 million in total expenses. After all expenses are backed out, the resultant gain, $67 million, represents a 13.4% gain for the investors in the fund.
On the other hand, if the index had declined 10%, to $45, the result would be a very different story. The investor would have lost $133 million, or 25% of his invested capital. The fund would also sell some of these depreciated securities to reduce index exposure to $734 million, or twice the amount of investor equity (now $367 million).
Note: This example does not take into account daily rebalancing, and long sequences of superior or inferior daily returns can often have a noticeable impact on the fund’s share holdings and performance.
Summary
Leveraged ETFs, like most ETFs, are simple to use but hide considerable complexity. Behind the scenes, fund management is constantly buying and selling derivatives to maintain a target index exposure. This results in interest and transaction expenses and significant fluctuations in index exposure due to daily rebalancing. Because of these factors, it is impossible for any of these funds to provide twice the return of the index for long periods of time. The best way to develop realistic performance expectations for these products is to study the ETF’s past daily returns as compared to those of the underlying index.
For investors that are already familiar with leveraged investing and have access to the underlying derivatives (e.g. index futures, index options, and equity swaps), leveraged ETFs may have little to offer. These investors will probably be more comfortable managing their own portfolio and controlling their index exposure and leverage ratio directly.
To read more on leveraged ETFs, see Rebound Quickly With Leveraged ETFs.
by Tristan Yates, (Contact Author | Biography)
Tristan Yates writes articles on index investing, options strategies, and leveraged portfolio management for Investopedia and Futures And Options Trader and distributed through Yahoo! Finance, Forbes, Kiplinger, and MSN Money, and his research on leveraged ETFs has been cited by the Wall Street Journal. He is the author of Enhanced Indexing Strategies: Utilizing Futures and Options to Achieve Higher Performance. Yates has an MBA from INSEAD, a leading international business school, started his career managing risk for the $550B GNMA portfolio and helped lead the $1.1 Trillon securities restatement at Fannie Mae.
Leveraged ETFs may not perform the way you think
List of (all?) ETFs
http://etf.stock-encyclopedia.com/category/leveraged-etfs.html
15 most beautifully busty Japanese babes
Can't stop from posting this one :)
http://coedmagazine.com/2009/10/26/the-15-most-beautifully-busty-japanese-babes/
Lock in the Gains: How High Probability Traders Exit ETF Trades
Lock in the Gains: How High Probability Traders Exit ETF Trades
http://www.tradingmarkets.com/.site/etfs/commentary/etfs/Lock-in-the-Gains-How-High-Probability-Traders-Exi-82609.cfmLock in the Gains: How High Probability Traders Exit ETF Trades
- By David Penn
- On 9:49 am EDT, Thursday October 29, 2009
With the dollar retreating after its overbought bounce and stocks and commodities advancing in the first few hours of trading on Thursday, now is a good time for ETF traders to focus on how to exit an ETF trade.
This is important for all ETF traders, whether you trade ETF PowerRatings, our High Probability ETF Trading strategies or simply use our research to help guide your own short-term, ETF trading. Knowing how to exit an ETF position is as fundamental a skill as entering an ETF trade. And in the same way that there are a variety of ways to take a trade on an ETF after it has pulled back, there are also a number of ways to properly exit an ETF trade. Being a discipline, professional-caliber trader means being as comfortable taking trades as exiting trades.
For a refresher on tactics for entering ETF trades, click here to read Larry Connors' Trading Lesson of the Day, "How to Correctly Trade Stocks and ETFs, Part 2".
Now let's look at a pair of strategies on how to exit an ETF trade.
The 5-Day Moving Average
The 5-day moving average exit is one of our most popular ways to exit an ETF trade. By waiting for an ETF bought on pullback to rally and close above its 5-day moving average, high probability ETF traders are exiting the ETF trade on strength - the goal of every mean reversion trade. Remember, as Larry Connors says, high probability trading is about "buying the selling and selling the buying." This means that when an ETF bought on pullback, or bought when its ETF PowerRatings was 8, 9 or 10 recovers and shows strength, it is time for the high probability trader to exit the ETF trade, lock in any gains and move on to the next opportunity.
After pulling back into oversold territory, the S&P 500 SPDR ETF (AMEX:SPY - News) rallied to close above its 5-day moving average soon afterward, providing an excellent opportunity to exit the ETF trade profitably.
The 2-Period RSI
Using the 2-Period RSI as a tactic for exiting an ETF trade is perhaps our favorite approach. While the 5-day moving average exit is an excellent way to exit an ETF trade, there can be instances in which the 5-day moving average exit will call for an exit sooner than the 2-period RSI. In this way, in addition to being relatively simpler to use, the 5-day moving average also can be a relatively conservative approach to exiting ETF trades.
In this example with the iShares MSCI Brazil Index ETF (NYSE:EWZ - News), waiting for the ETF to close with a 2-period RSI of more than 70 to exit helps improve gains on the trade. The numbers 8, 9 and 10 reflect EWZ's ETF PowerRatings during the pullback.
To exit an ETF trade using the 2-period RSI, high probability traders should wait for the ETF that have taken a position in to close with its 2-period RSI above 70. In exiting the ETF trade after the RSI has closed above 70, traders are waiting for the previously oversold ETF to become overbought. This is another way of "buying the selling and selling the buying." Because an overbought market represents a market that has become saturated - if not supersaturated - with buyers, waiting until that moment to exit an ETF trade is an excellent way to "sell the buying" and to the resumption in demand for the ETF as an opportunity for profit-taking.
High probability ETF trading requires a few things. But having a quantified, disciplined approach to entering and exiting ETF trades is near the top of the list. Sticking to a coherent strategy that allows you to enter and exit ETF trades the same way every time is key to being a winning, successful high probability trader.
David Penn is Editor in Chief at TradingMarkets.com.Best-Charts TA software
http://www.stock-anal.com/
ETF vs. Index Volume: Divergences and Trend Confirmation
http://www.portfoliotilt.com/Technical-Analysis/Education/etf-vs-index-volume-divergences-and-trend-confirmation.html
Gauging Support And Resistance With Price By Volume
Gauging Support And Resistance With Price By Volume
http://www.investopedia.com/articles/trading/06/PBVChart.aspSunday, October 18, 2009
PDF: John J. Murphy - Technical Analysis Of The Financial Markets
PDF: John J. Murphy - Technical Analysis Of The Financial Markets
http://w13.easy-share.com/1230440.html
Wait ~30 seconds, type in the security word and voila
Friday, October 16, 2009
PDF: A Non-Random Walk Down Wall Street
A Non-Random Walk Down Wall Street
Andrew W. Lo & A. Craig MacKinlay
http://press.princeton.edu/books/lo/Monday, October 12, 2009
http://www.finviz.com/
Good section for newbs, and great section on chart analysis (of recent charts)
http://decisionpoint.com/
Technical Analysis software that I use right now... There are obvious limitations to the software, such as 3-year (EOD) historical data (up to 10 yrs if you pay), and no TSX/TSX-V data feeds. Great to draw trend lines, fibonacci lines, etc.
www.ChartNexus.com
Sunday, October 11, 2009
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Sunday, October 4, 2009
Disable XP-forced restart
http://www.technize.com/2009/04/01/disable-annoying-restart-notification-after-windows-update/
Saturday, October 3, 2009
Japanese Candlestick Patterns
http://www.masterdata.com/CandleStick/index.html