Saturday 27 July 2013

Take the money and run

First the good news

The US market is still making those frightening intra-day down-moves . Yesterday the high to low movement was over 1% down. But the market recovered and ended a few points up on the day: another indication that the bulls are still there in the wings and have the edge. But the market is still flat, failing to make any progress for the seventh day in a row. 



The UK market continues to pull back. It's now one and a half percent below Wednesday's high. My losses have been modest. I suppose it makes up for the fact that I made so little on the way up.



Now the Bad

I have lost almost all the money I made on HSOL and EVC is down 20%. 

EVC has been struggling since I bought it. and in fact it made its first daily rise on Thusday but lost a chunk of that on Friday. The other shares I bought, using he same picking system a week ago, have yet to show a profit. I guess my timing was off so I am not too worried.

The share over which I am kicking myself is HSOL. Since I bought it, it has shot up in price and then down again. There is an influential share tipping service called Motley Fool that has had its knife into HSOL for the last couple of day's 

"China may have its fair share of struggles -- which has caused its strong economy to back off its 30-year average growth rate of 10% -- but when push comes to shove, plenty of investors are still paying close attention to multinational companies making investments in China. However, if there were one sector with a gigantic "beware" stamp attached to it, it would be Chinese solar panel producers like Hanwha SolarOne (NASDAQ: HSOL  ) ." 


These guys have influence and I should have bailed out as soon as they started to make noises about what they thought of the share. Not because they are right, but because they have lots of followers who act on their recommendations slavishly. I hate share tipping outfits, especially popular ones because they have a tendency to ramp shares, possibly for their own benefit. And they can, if they wish, do the opposite. Take short positions and then rubbish the share. I am not saying this is what has happened here, I do not know. But it can be done and it has been.



All I can do now is watch the news more carefully, looking out for danger signals and perhaps adding a rule to my trading that when I make 20% within a couple of days I grab the profit and move on.


No comments: