Good to hear from you.
I felt a bit bad after we took a hit on SFLX. (BTW I still am holding mine.) Hope you did well on DIIG.
From what I understand, you seem to like trading stocks, versus a longer term buy/hold strategy I normally use. After watching this sector a lot, I am tempted to try and trade a few of these stocks. The mid caps and small caps in this sector seem to be pretty volatile, with a lot of 10% swings up and down. For example, CMCI, ACTM, ELEX, all seem iteresting right now from a trading perspective. ACTM in particular is a strange stock. Almost every day it moves a point or more, and for a 20 dollar stock, that has a sound fundamental value, that's unusual.
The trick with these seem to be to stay out of the way of the money manager buy/sell programs. On DIIG, it is easy to see when the big boys buy programs kick in, and when they end. If we bought every time the stock retraces 10% from the end of the last buy program, and waited until a new buy program pushes the stock up about 10% above previous high, we could get a 15-20% moves on each trade. After a while this could add up to some real money.
I may just do a bit of trading on some of these, especially the ones I like long term.
On your index, I was thinking that instead of a market cap weighted index, just simply use recent market caps to establish a weighting, and then backtrack and forward track pricing from that point, say January 1 this year. Later if you wanted to get fancy, you could break the sector in Large/Mid-caps, Small caps, and Board manufacuters. BTW on this breakdown, my thoughts have changed a bit since I kicked this thread off. I think I would put ALRN, SFLX, PGTZ and AFLX in the board manufacturers, add NTAIF and XTEL to the ECM small caps, and put DIIG in the ECM large/mid-caps. We should drop CTN completely because it biases the index. I also would not put PKE, SHEL, KNT, and CHERA in the index for the time being. There could be many other companies in similiar businesses to theirs that we haven't ferreted out yet.
I also haven't been able to keep on top of current earnings announcements like I hoped when I started this thread.
Paul |
