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.