Bamboo cultivation can be a metaphor for life:
sometimes you have to pay attention, others you have to leave it alone to thrive by itself.
Bamboo, Taijiquan, living in Pittsburgh, part of the human family.

Saturday, December 25, 2004

phyllostachys five: holiday spirits...

12-25-2004 -- I don't always know what I'm going to type about here. Although I claim sanity, I have many thought streams coursing through my cerebrum at any given time. Some financial, some garden-oriented, some word/excel/powerpoint/edgar-ease/acrobat based (the day job), and some...well, we won't go there...they're not very G-rated. :-)

I cannot yet type about forex...although I have a gut feeling in which don't agree with the general opinion that the Euro (and other foreign currencies) will continue to rise in relation to the US dollar, I haven't done enough reading and comprehending to understand why I feel that way...other than the fact that I like to invest with a contrarian bent to my thinking and actions.

Forbes just published an article about Warren Buffet's forex trading. Granted, he's one of the world's elite bridge players and therefore is not truly tipping his hand to anyone...but supposedly he's still buying and renewing anti-dollar positions with an eye to a lower dollar:Euro ratio. He's recently made some $400+ million in currency-trade profits...but that's a fraction of Berkshire-Hathaway's $120 billion market cap...so it amounts a diversionary hedge for Mr. Buffet.

Nor can I talk much about recent stock market successes. Although QMCI is doing well, I sold a sizable position (sizable for me, that is...) in AEXCA (Ampex Corp) after it'd risen from 21 to 35...it has risen further, to 42.50. I just bought back in at 40, so we'll see if this low-float tape storage company, which is banking on its stable of patents to boost it's bottom line, is able to push into the stratosphere. But although I'm having long-term good feelings about RIMM, I bought that at 90 and it's now down to 82. I bought more at 82 (one of my critics considers my lack of stop-losses to be down-right stupid...quoting IBD articles about catching falling knives...)...but am wondering if quintupled profit, and strong foreign sales can move RIMM beyond certain US patent troubles.


AEXCA reminds me of several other low-float-but-now-sub-orbital stocks: that same favourite critic told me of ASVI, which is low-float but is riding the popularity derived from selling tractor-like vehicles and having Catepillar as a beneficial owner...

2-15-2005 -- I won't say much, as I need to post a blog entry devoted to today, but the text above was to be my Winter Holiday 2004 posting...and I haven't touch my blog since I started typing it. I was intending to segway into discussion about substance abuse, as some of my family has had problems about that. Although the only substance I abuse is Starbuck's coffee (I've recently attempted to switch to black tea, with varying degrees of success), I just had a beer (Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, my overall favorite), so I won't touch the substance abuse tangent for now... Suffice it to say, Happy (Chinese) New Year!

See my Valentines posting for more sagacious stock tips!

..phyllostachys.

Sunday, December 19, 2004

Phyllostachys Four: Think and Grow Rich

Napolean Hill is one of innumerable people who have proposed schemes or recipes for the "get rich quick" ideals....except that he had personal research to back up his plan. Can you "think and grow rich"? See this review of Hill's classic self-help book:

"Think and Grow Rich

By Napoleon Hill

[a book review] by Michael C. Gray

April 24, 2001

When I meet with young people coming into public accounting, I'm stunned that they are unaware of many of the classics of success philosophy and motivation. One that should be in everyone's success library is Think And Grow Rich.

Andrew Carnegie was the Bill Gates of his day. He came to the United States from Scotland and made a fortune in the steel industry. When you use a public library, you can thank Andrew Carnegie, who became a great philanthropists and made donations for building many of the public libraries in the United States. He also made big endowments to Universities.

Andrew Carnegie also had the reputation of having more millionaires working for him than any other employer of his time.

Carnegie was fascinated with success and wanted to understand why some men became successful while others in very similar circumstances did not. So he commissioned Napoleon Hill to interview the nation's most successful men to find a success formula that would work for the common man. Hill interviewed 504 people, including Ford, Wrigley, Wanamaker, Eastman, Rockefeller, Edison, Woolworth, Darrow, Burbank, Morgan, Firestone, and three United States Presidents.

The process of conducting these interviews required an investment of twenty years of Napoleon Hill's life.

Hill distilled his findings into a 13 step formula, which was published in Think And Grow Rich.

Since Think And Grow Rich was first published in 1937, it has been used as a roadmap to achievement by countless individuals. (Incidentally, Melvin Powers initially built the Wilshire Book Company by getting the paperback publishing rights to Think And Grow Rich and making it a best seller.)

As you may gather from the title, a premise of Think And Grow Rich is the starting place for wealth is in a person's thoughts.

The source for most of today's motivational speakers remains Think And Grow Rich. So why not go back to the source yourself? Be sure to include Think And Grow Rich on your reading list."
[http://www.profitadvisors.com/growrich.shtml]

One of the greatest debates in today's society is the increasing, seemingly unbridgeable chasm between those we deem wealthy and those we deem poor. The only equitable way to address this debate and to bridge the chasm is to educate those who are poor on methods for altering their lot in life to better themselves and their respective families and peers. This education will not come in the form of schooling...but through one of the world's oldest arts, that of proselytizing - teaching by human contact, advertising and publication (in all forms of media) ideas relevant to changing one's knowledge and viewpoint, to be aware of the possibilities available for short- and long-term wealth and health creation.

Do you agree with this? Is this a hopeless and solutionless conundrum? Leave a comment... ;-)

..Phyllostachys.

Saturday, December 11, 2004

phyllostachys three: rhizomes and forex

I don't know much about rhizomes, aside from them being the pesky part of a running bamboo plant that you either find with a spade or with a sharp eye as it pokes its business end over a root barrier in search of greener pastures. But, I know even less about forex, or "foreign exchange", the "simultaneous buying of one currency and selling of another" [http://www.forex.com/history_forex.html].

That's the thing I love about the internet...if there's something you don't know about, do a Google search, and start across the next bridge of knowledge and understanding!

Although this may...

Darn! scooped by the WSJ again! :-)

WSJ - 12/14/04 - Personal Journal - "How Investors Are Playing the Weak Dollar" - Financial Services Offer Options Ranging from Currency Trading To the Purchase of Foreign Bonds.

More to come on your forex options, from Bamboo Thoughts.

..Phyllostachys.

phyllostachys two: tracking

It's been many moons since I've drafted a stock related e-mail. I've been a little reticent lately due to mixed returns and mixed feeliings about giving advice. I'm not an investment professional - I just have, from years of personal reading and trading, a certain knack for tracking along various trails of the market.

I've said before that I like using the resources of finance.yahoo.com for tracking portfolios. The site gives you a free set of information, albeit with quotes delayed by 15 minutes, that allows you to track individual securities along with related news posts from all sorts of media sources. If you're consistent about reading the news, you can often still find what I'll term stock arbitrage situations.

For example, I've been watching with interest the accretion of companies that is building MobilePro (MOBL.OB [finance.yahoo.com appends ".OB" to represent within its database the existence of the stock on the OTCBB rather than NASDAQ]). About two months ago, MobilePro, an emerging telecom and WiFi technology company, announced that it was seeking to acquire Davel Corp, an owner of some 25,000 payphones, out of Cleveland, OH. The morning of the announcement, Davel was trading at about $.0035....a very low price. As MobilePro had stated an intended purchase price of $.015 per share, I saw an obvious (though very speculative) chance to make at least a few bucks (i.e., a nearly instant four-fold return), and I immediately purchased some 13,000 shares at $.0035. That amounted to only about $60...but this stock had been trading rather thinly, at this low price, so a larger buy order might have spiked the price prematurely (also, for frequent traders, Fidelity's per-trade fee is $8.00, so the trade fee wasn't a huge issue). As it was, the stock moved up smartly later in the day, and over the next couple of weeks moved up to the target buy-out price of $.015. With the move up in price, volume also spiked, allowing me to sell with a comfortable profit at about $.0145. Pretty cool, even though the amount was small.

More recently (this past week, in fact), I started looking again at Research in Motion (RIMM), the Blackberry wireless e-mail device manufacturer, again. I'd reviewed RIMM about 15 months ago, when the stock was at about $6 (split-adjusted). At the time, I figured the stock was just too pricey to justify buying the stock. Now, it's selling at about $88. Hmmmm. :-)

So, although I just bought some RIMM, in the anticipation that they're hitting their appreciation stride, I watched the associated news blurbs about companies trailing on RIMM's coat-tails. Quotemedia, Inc., (QMCI.OB) is one such company. Now that Blackberry's (and similar competing devices) have readable color screens, various media companies will develop services to utilize the wireless color capabilities. Quotemedia delivers stock-related graphs, tracking lists, and instant prices to those of us obsessed with up-to-the minute trading info. QMCI.OB was trading at about $.30 earlier this past week. At the time of the announcement, I bought at about $.32...and just recently added to my position at about $.52. We'll see if this very lightly capitalized company has the resources to build a Blackberry clientele. :-)

..Phyllostachys.

phyllostachys one

This blog is the first in a series of blogs generated from the blend of my personal reading, research, studying and general living. My current interests range from music by Third Eye Blind to Mozart, from bamboo cultivation to tai chi study, and from hard sci-fi (from Jules Verne to Halo 2) to tech investing. I blend these varied interests, and others, to make my life (along with work, a long daily commute, and family).

This blog will primarily consist of short investment newsletters, to be sprinkled with other items from my list of interests as I have time to add them. My life primarily consists of work, and a long daily commute to/from work, so everything else fills in the nooks and crannies as best they can.

As for the name of the blog? Phyllostachys is a species of bamboo consisting of about 30 family members. See: [http://www.tripplebrookfarm.com/iplants/Phyllostachys.html]. My personal favorite (and potential enemy, of course) is Phyllostachys Vivax, which has been growing in my garden for about seven years now, here in Western Pennsylvania, USA. My interest in bamboo springs from a joint interest in oriental philosophies & martial arts, and gardening. Asian culture refers to bamboo as the "old man"...presumably because the bamboo is always green and it lives for so long (many decades) before flowering, going to seed, and dying.

As I work on this blog, I'll seek to update my personal webpage, and dovetail its existence into this blog. :-)

..Phyllostachys.

Twitter: alex_landefeld


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