Chasing the Wind

Once GoDaddy stops mucking about with my web hosting (I’m supposed to call back after 5pm; they won’t look at it until then), then I’ll start my conversion to WordPress. WordPress allows “categories”, and this will be my first entry in the “Financial” section.

It was my Stock Trading Day today. One Monday a month I weed through my portfolio, buying and selling according to Mechanical Investing formulas. These formulas are developed in a little out-of-the-way forum on Motley Fool, run by volunteers, to apply non-emotional stock picking formulas based on backtesting. I’m currently following the Ancer Screen of Screens (mostly Relative Strength stocks) with a couple of picks from LowPE_ZLTD, LPE_YLD, or YLDEARNYEAR screens (Value stocks). I know that sounds Greek to anybody reading this, but I’ll flesh out more details later. I had great years from 98-99, gave a lot of it back from ’00-’02, and slowly rebuilding again.

The funny thing about Mechanical Investing is that if I’m lazy, I never look the company up and I don’t know what they do. Oh, I’m not buying blindly; based on what I researched on stock fundamentals, I know what properties in a stock I’m looking for, and picked out formulas that matched those fundamentals. But in the list below, this is the first time I’m looking up who they are.

Anyway, today I sold off these; returns are for the month of May:
HU +1.4% (Hudson United Bank)
JCP +6.6% (JCPenney) Retailing did well this month
NAP +16.4% (National Processing, +16.4%). Great return; they process credit cards.
PHM +5.7% (Pulte Homes) New homes still doing well.
SPF -10.9% (Standard Pacific) OK, maybe not; this home builder stunk this month.
STNR +1.9% (Steiner Leisure) Spa services. Dang, I owned a day spa and didn’t know it.
WGO -11.9% (Winnebago) High gas prices knocked this stock off its wheels.
ERICY -2.8% (Ericsson Telepones)
FHN -1.9% (First Horizon National Bank)
MDC -0.3% (MDC Holdings) Another home builder.
OPTN -6.0% (Option Care) At-home pharmacy for chronically ill people. Had no idea there was such a thing.
RIMM +6.7% (Research In Motion) I bought an option that doubled last year on this stock, they make wireless stuff.
WM -9.7% (Washington Mutual) Just like new homes, bank stocks are headed down.

I’m holding on to SMF +19.8% (Smart & Final), also known as Cash & Carry. I’ve never heard of them, but they have 173 stores in California and Oregon. Apparently the formulas say this stock still has room to go up.

I bought these replacements:
PBR (Petroleo Brasil)
BDK (Black & Decker)
SEAC (Seachange Intl) A overseas shipping company.
DDS (Dillards)
CHTT (Chattem Inc) Ooh, makes of Icy Hot and Gold Bond Medicated Cream. Exciting.
SWN (Southwest Energy) Natural gas exploration. Makes sense with high price of crude.
PKX (Posco) Korean steel company.
APC (Anadarko Petroleum)