I am a silver miner today

• Silver could be a safe haven in case of disasters.
• Silver besides being a precious metal, is very much needed by industry (so I read somewhere).
• Pan American Silver Corp. (PAAS) is World’s second Silver producer/miner, and I can’t figure out which is the first.
• 3% dividend yield is something I like very much, specially considiring that Payout ratio is  an honest 30%
• Forward P/E ( Dec 31, 2014): 10.01 seems cheap enough to me, although current P/E = 30 is quite high. The different between future and current may depend on expected growth (GOOD!) or some accounting charges PAAS wrote off this year (NEUTRAL)
• PAAS is packed with cash: Total Cash=542.32 M and Total Debt= 77.98 M, means that 20% of the price I pay is cash. Remaining 80% in silver looks really great!

sources:

http://www.wealthdaily.com/resources/the-best-silver-stocks

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=PAAS+Key+Statistics

It’s like a rich kid in high school who discovered he wasn’t invited to a party, so he threw a better party and no one came.

Facebook’s edge over Google:

• data on which Google is built ( web sites all over the World) is available to Facebook and to anyone able to build a spider.
• data available to Facebook is locked.

Google’s edge over Facebook:

1. much better technology
2. much better mobile strategy
3. much richer
4. ads based on what you are searching for are much better than ads based on who you are.

Facebook may be a better investment than Google in the long run because:

• Facebook is cheaper: Market Cap is $62 B vs GOOG’s $ 240 B 
• Facebook can buy or copy better technology and search. Facebook could even enhance one user’s search result based on:
  • user’s previous likes
  • user’s data
  • user’s friends behavior and likes
• Facebook can display search related ads, once it has introduced its search
• Facebook is getting rich too
• Facebook can become a payment system.

Sources:

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/facebook-bull-silicon-valley-investor-160918960.html

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=GOOG+Key+Statistics

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=FB+Key+Statistics

I have never liked IBM as a company, this is very unfortunate because buying  it 10 years late, I misses the chance to double or triple up my investment.

I hope it just late and not  too late!

Order Status:Executed 8 Executed 11/05/12, 10:05:15 AM (ET) @ $193.11: Total:$1,552.95.

IBM is a great company, it is on the cheap side:

Trailing P/E : 13.87
Forward P/E  : 11.60

It goes give ok dividends:

Forward Annual Dividend Yield: 1.80%

What is not good regarding IBM is the lacking of current growth:

Qtrly Revenue Growth (yoy): -5.40%

Qtrly Earnings Growth (yoy): -0.40%

What about SanDisk that produces those?

I started from a great stock I own: STX. Seagate is an amazing company.

• Its revenue was up 56.80% year on year.
• Its earnings growth was stellar 751.30%.
• It is dirt cheap: they sell for price five times its earnings (P/E=4.77).
• Expectations for next year are better still P/E= 4.74.
• Dividend yields 4.1%, up 30% from previous year.

source for those numbers

If Seagate is so wonderful and has numbers of the company everybody would like to own, why is it so dirt cheap?

Answering to that question tells me why Sandisk may be a great investment: Seagate’s job is to make hard disk, but hard disk are considered a technology of the present and past, while solid state disks (SSD) are a technology of the past.

Guess who makes solid state disks? Sandisk.

Guess who is selling solid state memory used in brand new Iphone 5? Sandisk.

Sandisk is also making memory cards that go into our camera. Sandisk is a new brand I didn’t even know two years ago. Sandisk is profittable now and can boon in the future. The market prices it very reasonably for a company that sells a technology of the future:

P/E: 16.62. It is expected to even improve:

Forward P/E: 14.17

That is why I did this transaction:
Date 09/26/2012

TSNDK Buy 35 SANDISK CORP

Price: $42.58

Total investmet: ($1,495.25)

transparent kayak

Two weeks after buying airplane tickets and hotel, I found those two websites that could have saved me more than $1000 on my reservation, by automatically comparing hundred of prices in seconds:

• http://www.trivago.com gets the best deal for my hotel reservation
• http://www.kayak.com gets the best deal for any flight

I found out about those valuable resources when I read on an article that Kayak’s IPO was delayed after Facebook’s fiasco. I wondered what Kayak was.  So I found out that I could have saved $1000.

This is a plus of investing. It makes me find out best companies and services that can save me money.

By the way I decided I will never buy into kayak IPO. If Kayak makes me save money as a consumer, it will not make money for itself. When Kayak will want revenue, they’ll start getting some money for their service. Whoever will pay them will be favored by their search engine that will stop being able to find the fare for me.

Dont you ever use “Sell Stop” for stocks you buy? … for example, many suggest you always use 5% “sell stop”.. or 10% .. and just buy some other stocks, if the ones you bought are not going in the direction (up) you hoped/wanted ?

It is for 3 reasons

Reason 1)

The only way to make money on the stock market is to buy low and sell high.

Most stocks move together up in good times and down in bad times. Automatic stop loss results in forcing to sell a bunch of stocks, even good ones, as the market sinks.

With my strategy, I have to buy every month, even when markets point down. In bad times I can hardly sell any stock because they can’t hit “up 40% target” in bad times.

As soon as market recovers most stocks that I buy in bad times hit my 40% up target and I make money.

What I accomplish that way is buying low and selling high. The best think is that I do it automatically, without having to understand or forecast what is going on in the Economy.

S&P 500 and NASDAQ 2002 to 2012

If we look at the last 10 years, we can see that if I had bought every month and if I had a stop, I’d have  sold with a big losses every stock the next month in 2002, 2007 and 2008. Without stop losses I was just buying a stock every month in 2002, 2007 and 2008, when they cost about half the price they have now. With my strategy I sold a lot in 2004, 2007, 2011, because stocks were doubling up, making it easy for me to reach my 40% target on most stocks. What is great it that happened by itself, without any need to be an Economist or a financial analyst.

Reason 2)

I don’t trust banks, traders and markets. In the short run they can manipulate a good stock and send it down 10% to take advantage of your stop loss and buy cheap. They did tricks like that several times lately and they blamed “computer mistakes”. I wrote about those dirty tricks here

Reason 3)

I have the ability to invest $1500 every month. I hope I will not be forced to sell. I  sell to make more money, not because I do need the money. This is the only way to execute free stock strategy.

The answer is simple: “TOP-LINE” means REVENUES and “BOTTOM-LINE” means EARNINGS: this graph below is a good and clear example:

Top line shows revenue and bottom line shows earningns for EBIX

The graph also helps me to understand why Revenue is called TOP LINE and Earnings BOTTOM LINE:

Since Earnings = Revenue – Expenses, then Earnings are smaller (less dollars) than Revenues. On a graph showing dollars over time, Revenues will always be the top line and Earnings the bottom line.

Of course a good company should show healthy growth bot on the top line and on the bottom line. I had to look for those definitions to understand the meaning of the frase:

“It’s been a couple of years since Amazon beat expectations on both the top and the bottom line” from this article

It is so good to beat expectations on both top and bottom lines, that Amazon stock price went up 15% in a day after this event.

Unfortunately I was never able to buy AMZN shares because of their 90 P/E ratio price tag.

I hope that some of my lagging stocks will “ beat expectations on both the top and the bottom line” too….

Sources:

http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/149.asp#axzz1tEJYGSfU

for graph: http://www.gurufocus.com/news/144526/ebix-improvement-in-operating-efficiency-with-high-return

Samsung is Apple's only serious competitor

Just sold 6 Samsung shares at EUR 272 each:

ESEG Sell XETRA SMG SP GDR 144A/RGS EUR 6 272 03/04/12 15:42:25 6 272,00

5 minutes ago I sold 6 Samsung shares at  EUR 272 each. I made a total amount of EUR 1632.

It is a bit more than the $ 1560 I had spend on November 16, 2010 when I bought 8 SSU (Samsung) shares at EUR 194,95 each.

Thanks to Samsungs’s good performance and to my free stocks strategy I sold 6 for more than I had paid 8.

I am now an happy owner of 2 free SSU shares worth EUR 544.

How to avoid the ripoff?

Hard (bad) facts:

• On Friday, 23 Mar 2012 Apple shares lost 9% of their value in seconds, due to some market “error” called “Flash Crash”.
• the Flash Crash, also known as The Crash of 2:45, was a United States stock market crash on May 6, 2010 in which the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged about 1000 points—or about nine percent—only to recover those losses within minutes.

Now I imagine myself having put a stop loss that is met in seconds, or I imagine putting a sell order at market price. I would have sold 9% under market price. Then I’d have started sending fire emails to my stock broker. I’d also have writen a Blog Post about it. But my money would have gone down the flush.

What Can I do about it?

1. No preset authomatic orders like “Stop” Orders
2. No more selling or buying at “market”. From now on I’ll always set a limit for my trades

Source:

http://www.cnbc.com/id/46835129

Aprile Mar 10 Gio 12