up 40% in three months

Another EUR 1000 coming back home from their 4 months trip to conquer me free stocks.

My “Free stock of the month” is an ETF. A nice one which replicates the price and yield performance of shares in the Brazilian market, as measured by the MSCI Brazil Index.

In June I had bought 30 of those . EUR 32.56 each. Total amount: EUR 979.75.

Now DBXT MSCI BRAZ 1CC is up 40%

Today I sold 22 of those for EUR 45.35 each. Total amount cashed out by me: EUR  991.4

I now own 8 free shares of DBXT MSCI BRAZ and EUR 11 more on my bank account!

Thank you FREE STOCKS STRATEGY !

I wanted to buy the Chinese offshore oil company CNOOC in March .I  should have because CEO shares are 40% up now. Actually anybody should have bought about anything in March… markets are 60% higher!

Today I spent $1,028.37 to get 7 CEO shares ($146.13 each). If I had bought them in March I’d have 10 in my portfolio and some extra cash.

I chose this offshore oil company for several reasons:

1) China’s Economy is great. Not even the great recession could stop it.

2) Such liquidity may spur inflation. Oil is a commodity and it works as protection against inflation

3) Chinese car sales are up 80% from last year. I’m afraid there isn’t enough oil for all the World. Prices will go up.

4) Offshore is where most new oil is found. CEO has younger oil fields and more chances to find new ones.

5) CEO has excellent numbers. Good dividend yield around 4% and low forward P/E

6) I already own Petrochina, so I diversify with CEO.

It is surprising how stupid the Internet is sometimes. There is no way to find simple informations, like basic data for stocks traded on itnternational markets.

not easy to figure out data from ideograms

I don’t want much, just a place where I can find P/E ratio, dividends, debts earning growth and sales growth for companies traded all over the World.

So far there is no such website. Google finanace doesn’t give decent data outside USA. On yahoo finance you canfind something only if you start digging into places like yahoo. fr yahoo.it yahoo.es or yahoo.de, but you need some understanding of foreign languages. The real disaster is when you need data about Japaneese, Russian or Chinese comanies. Then you’re lost into ideograms with no hope of understanding. Anyway yahoo finance usually has very little data even on its internatrional portals.

The best place I found so far is msn . I could find some data on msn.es, msn.fr … and so on. At least I could spot p/e and dividends. The problem of ideograms is still there, but I don’t think there is anything better than msn available

The most expensive share I ever got: 1 costs $ 2,849.

All you get when you buy BRK-B shares

I hate gurus, but I had to invest on Warren Buffet’s BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY this time, because Buffet could exploit the crisys, taking advantage of tax payer’s money like we the people, the small investors, simply  cannot do:

1. He was able to lend money to troubled financial institutions at very high interest rates
2. Those high interest investments are safe almost like US Corporate Bonds because US government decided that those financial institutions are “too big to fail”. Of course Buffet had talks with both administrations. He knew he could get huge interest rates and be backed  by taxpayer’s money
3. Moreover, if financial stocks will recover, Berkshire Hathaway can convert those credits into shares no matter how high they will get

This situation for Warren Buffet is WIN WIN WIN… win getting high interest rates,win bacause goverment backed,  win because stocks may rise.

Berkshire also has shares of good companies,which I like.

I consider those deals, tailored for Berkshire, as ripoffs because they are not available to us small investors. Investing is about reality. Reality is the fact that those deals have been made. All I can do is to take some advantage of them.

The only trouble is that with 1 share I can’t use  my free stocks strategy.

I think Brazil will be in good position in the unlikely event of  an economic recovery.

06/25/09 12:35  on bought ETF on Brazil stock market: DBXT MSCI BRAZ 1CC :

I bought 30 shares  price EUR 32.56 each

Total ammount: EUR 979.75

Yesterday Tjey, one of my 3 or 4 readers,  asked me: “[...] if you suggest book for novice trader what book would suggest to read and why”

First reason why It is hard to me to suggest such a book is simple: I never read a book about trading. I’m actually not a trader. All I do is:

• read finance.yahoo.com everyday,
• check my portfolio loaded on finance.google.com which gives news about shares I own,
• read articles about Economics in regular newspapers
• distrust financial gurus, economists, politicians, central banks, CEOs, bloggers, funds, whoever charges commissions, myself
• think with my own head, knowing there great chances I’m wrong
• buy $ 1000 worth of stocks every month and
• get  $ 1000 back every  time one of my stocks goes 40% up. That way I try to build a “Free stocks Portfolio”

Since my investment attitude is distrust, I’m afraid to look for a book that my reader may trust. Anyway I must do my best to help. After keeping this Blog for years, I can’t afford to scale bach from 3 or 4 readers to 2 o 3 readers .

What I would do if I was TJ, would be go to Amazon.com and look for “trading stocks”. Here is what I found:

1. “The Complete Guide to Investing in Short Term Trading: How to Earn High Rates of Returns Safely by Alan Northcott”: disgusting title. If our friend Alan was able to earn high rates he would not have wasted his time writing a stupid book. Don’t trust the author, don’t waste time reading him.
2. “A Beginner’s Guide to Day Trading Online”: to avoid. In most cases day trading is just a good way to waste money in commissions and miss the best utrends
3. “The Neatest Little Guide to Stock Market Investing by Jason Kelly” I don’t the title but the book may be ok. If they called it simply “Little Guide to Stock Market Investing” I would probably buy it for mysels. I read some pages and seem simple to undertand and still quite interesting.
4. Seasonal Stock Market Trends: The Definitive Guide to Calendar-Based Stock Market Trading: bullshit Definitive is only death. Seasonal is agricolture.
5. Core Trading Tactics: no. Trading is more about strategy than tactics

1. It is hard to defeat the  giant. Google, Apple, The Open Source communty, all claim that Microsoft is evil and that their products are better. Still I am Blogging from Windows PC, and chances are you’re reading me using Microsoft software. It is not easy to change people’s habbits and Miscroft has shown great ability to defends its core markets, while competing on new markets, like mobile devices, Internet services, Gaming…  Things can change, but nobody has yet proven they can really hurt Microsoft
2. We, the people want cheap stuff. Snobs can still pay twice as much to get same CPU and same RAM on a Mac, but I am not going to throw all that money on a sleek design. Most of the 6 Billion people on this planet wouldn’t do so either. Developing countries are adopting Windows. They can’t afford Apple’s cool stuff.
3. We the people want hussle free stuff. Linux may be cool. Maybe even cooler than Steve Job’s cool Macs… But we, the people have learned to use Windows. It is too hard for us to learn Linux too. I did try to use Ubuntu. Everything worked fine, except for the fact that my HP Pavilion is mute under Ubuntu. I lost a day onn forums, on updates, on synoptics stuff, on shell commands. No result at all. Maybe Vista sucks, but it works fine for me and I can’t by any means give up my Skype conversations or my Yahoo finanace tech ticker video.
4. We the people love dividends. Yea yea, Google is a powerhouse. Sure Apple makes great products… but where is the cash? Microsoft yields 2.4% dividends: excellent for a company that only uses 25% of its earnigs to pay our dividends.
5. We the people love bargains. P/E = 12 is a bargain for an healthy company that has cash worth one tenth of  its price tag (market cap)

Same stupid question we, the uneducated investors, pose:

Can BBI (or any other stock) it go further down???

Of course it can! One of the few things I have learned it that they CAN ALWAYS GO DOWN

I have 60 free BBI shares. When I got them (by my free stock strategy), it was a year ago and they were worth $4.11 each, form a total amount of $ 246. They went 80% down to $0.7 and are worth $40 now.

Now I do wonder… 80% down from last year, 95% down from year 2002. Is this company going broke?

In my opinion, not really broke. Less than $1 B debt is not sucha big deal for a company with sales over $5 B. Will this recession hurt Blockbuster painfully? IMHO not really. Renting a movie is a cheap entertainment for a family. Picking it up at a Blockbuster store may be fun.

According to Blockbusters, they will post earnings in 2009 around $ 40 M.  For a company that has market cap around $140 M it would mean P/E ratio under 4.

So we are back to the point. Will BBI fail? Some analysts fear they may fail.

I think BBI won’t fail, but I have strong doubts.