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Strategies & Market Trends : Value Investing -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sergio H who wrote (49670)	10/6/2012 11:10:49 PM
From: Spekulatius	4 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 78751

>>In all fairness, you have a lot of losers because you have a lot of different stocks in your portfolio. That's how you choose to play it, no critisism on that, although if you buy so many stocks it might be more efficient to just buy ETFs or mutual funds. << While I don't have that many stock, don't believe the above statement is necessarily true. If you are an individual investor, there are a lof of ways to grind out performance, that you can't do, if you play mutual funds or even ETF's. You can be more tax efficient, by selling destinctive lot's, you can use, small fluctuations in thinly traded stocks, to play a market maker of sorts, buying into these seemingly senseless dips and selling into the spikes, grinding out a few percent here and there. If you own or follow many stocks, there is always something going on that can be exploited, imo. Sure, you are sometimes left holding a bag, but in most cases, these stocks move in often irrational fashion. The biggest advantage that individual investors have is that they can deal in stocks that the funds usualy can't touch , for lack of liquidity or because they don't fit within their investment agenda. Sure you could try to run a concentrated portfolio but in many illiquid situations, you could only put a few thousand $ in, so you need many of them to make an impact.

To: Sergio H who wrote (49670)	10/7/2012 2:23:30 AM
From: Paul Senior	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 78751

I generally put the losing stocks I sell on my watch list and review their subsequent performance 1) to see if the reason for selling was valid 2) to see if I was vindicated in exiting the position 3) to see if I'll ever find the stock so attractively low vs its current value or the company's current business conditions, that I might want to reenter. I only haphazardly follow the stocks of winners after I've closed out the position. Biggest changes I've made in past few years are portfolio/allocation related: 1. Reducing margin substantially. 2. Keeping sizeable cash reserves. 3. Moving into preferred stocks/bond funds/mlps/etf's for distribution yield 4. Making smaller $ buys with initial positions. 5. Concentrating on oil/oil service stocks. Evaluating e&p juniors differently from other businesses. Namely, using p/cash flow, p/flow bopd, price 2pnav10, et. al. I've made no change elsewhere in valuation techniques. Using my same metrics and yardsticks. We know EKS's big change or one of them is reducing holding period. I'm quicker to take sell too. I still want to hold on for full/fair value as I see it, but fear of market volatility gets me sometimes. So my turnover has increased and holding period has been reduced. What are you guys' changes that you've made over the past few years?