1) One thing I do not agree with Warren Buffett about is the idea that an inexpert investor should invest exclusively in the tamest kinds of investments. You could put 1% of your money into the opposite of that, penny stocks, and I think you will benefit from the experiment. You will, at the very least, gain insight. You might, at the most - as long as you observe the most basic rules, which are: do not invest borrowed money, do not short sell, make lots of small investments, not one big investment, think very carefully before adding cash to make up for losses, and go for big, big returns.
2) Penny stocks are not a scam. Yes, many individual penny stocks may be scams, or, just, busts, but the penny stock market has a legitimate economic role. It's where people go to try really new things. It's not necessarily that a lot of penny stock companies will eventually become big players in industry. The reality of it is, you will find interesting people doing interesting and very ambitious things behind penny stocks, and you will find that those people are so grateful for your tiny contribution - your purchase of 1,000 shares for ten dollars - that they will gladly work and work, with exceptional concentration, essentially on your behalf. Actual CEOs will even send you long, newsy, serious letters, sincere letters, basically, just thanking for holding onto your shares when they were cheap.
3) Again, it's not that all their effort will necessarily or even in all probability produce something in the nature of a giant company - the evidence for and against is interesting; I'll have to return to it - but even if they don't, all their efforts will generate excitement in the penny stock market, and, if you are nimble - and I'll return to that - you will be able to benefit from just that. This is almost the most speculative thing I could say. I am disagreeing with Mr. Buffett that ordinary people should entirely avoid speculation. There is something to learn from it, and for that reason if for no other, inexperienced investors
especially should experiment with it, just a little.
4) Let me give you just a bit of description of penny stock trading, so you have an idea what I'm suggesting you get into. What I recommend is that you put $500 into a Scottrade account. Or any discount brokerage. Scottrade is big, I trust it, I've been with them for a long time, I like their service, and I know their platform, so I can discuss it. $500 is the minimum balance to open an account. If you just have $500 in cash in a Scottrade account, it's not going anywhere, and you can use their research tools, and even invest a few dollars, when you're ready. Dip your toe in some time with a $20 investment.
5) Now that you have an account, log in and locate the screener. Here's one way: click the quotes and research tab. When that page comes up, click the stocks link. When the page refreshes - I guess it gives you a stocks page, which, really, you might want to study a little - you will see, below the stocks link, the screener link.
6) On the screener page, click the price performance bar. From the list of price performance criteria, select price change. specify -50% in the less than box, and select "in 52 weeks".
7) The screener will then show you the number of stocks on the resulting list. I would expect it to be around 2000.
8) That is far too many stocks. You'll never look at all of them.
9) Let's think about the logic of what we're doing a bit. Stocks down 50% - screening for that - is a setting that actually gives us an advantage. First, it scans for a measure of volatility. These stocks are showing they can move. And, second, it scans - however imprecisely - for a low price. One suggestion I would make for the aspiring trader - and we'll see, in time, why there are real reasons to trade, and not just invest, in penny stocks - is to always buy penny stocks when they are down, and never when they are up. Until you've studied further, that can only mean something very general to you, but keep it in mind.
10) Or, as Warren Buffett puts it, when stocks go down, they are going on sale. When things go on sale, the people offering the sale price are saying "this would be a good time to buy". That might or might not be true, but at least now we're looking at stocks that are on sale, and might, right now, be buys. We've narrowed the list of all stocks a bit. We now have a list of stocks that actually do move - their price fluctuates more than most - and that are on sale.
But we need to narrow the list some more.
11) So, I decided to test this, and logged on to my account, and ran through the procedure I described (as it turns out, described accurately) and got a list of 2194 stocks, as expected. And then, I selected the price criterion, and that selection gets added to the scan, and there I specified, going into mystic mode a bit, prices between $4.95 and $5.
12) Those, I was thinking, are kind of magic numbers. And I was shocked, in a good way, by the result: 115 stocks, another magic number. But there's some reasoning behind $4.95 and $5 as the limits, which I want you to know about. Think about it this way: it is possible that some big stock trading around $100 today will trade above $200 tomorrow. That's an outside possibility. On the other, it's a complete certainty that a large number of stocks trading below 1 cent today will trade, tomorrow, for double what they traded for today. However, most of that large number of extreme penny stocks will be stocks you can't buy, couldn't buy if you wanted to. Since looking at a stock takes time, it would be better not to have to look at all of those. And we can describe the difference between bargains you can buy and ones you can't buy as "substantiality". How substantial is the stock?
13) Now, I am tiptoeing into this experiment with a bit of trepidation. The higher the price, is how I figure it, the less the likelihood the stock will double in a day, or double in a month, or do anything like that. And I want that kind of result. Am I going to look at $5 stocks, and find none that attract me, none that show the signs of being ready to give me a big, quick return? Am I going to spend the time I'll need to spend, to look at these stocks, and get nothing out of it. But, when it comes down to it, I expect, really, to find some good stocks to follow, in this group ... and not so many that actually aren't worth looking at.
14) We may now have narrowed the market, all 14,000 issues of it, to 115 that are, well, almost ideal. What's next? I'm going to start looking at stocks (I mean, at those 115).
15) First off, something weird happened. When I looked at the scan result after an hour of writing, it said only one stock passed. Did all those stocks move to another level? I restarted the scan, and picked another price range, $3.59 to $3.99. But I paused and looked at that stocks page, where there's a list, as it turns out, of day's winners. You click on the symbol for one of them, and you get a 5 year chart for Visa, now trading up 25% in a month or something at $250. I'm saying, it has rallied sharply in recent days. So I'm doing my standard thing, and studying this five year chart. Was there anything in it that could have predicted a sharp rally? Well, Visa went up strongly for several years, and then it started to vibrate a bit, and, in the second half of 2013, it formed a point. I mean, you can see it in the chart, pointing at $200. Then it jumped up a little, and then it came right back down to the point of the point, where it marked a price. And, at that price, it created a neat little double bottom, the two bottoms, a month apart. Then it rallied a little and then formed, over a six month period or so, a bat pattern. I'm talking about with ears. You can see it in the chart. On the left is one wing tip, the early 2014 double bottom, and, finally, on the right, another wing tip, where prices briefly returned to that double bottom low, $200. There ensued, in short order, this little, quick 25% rally.
16) So, protracted rallies, followed by points, followed by bats, with two wing tips, is a pattern we might look for, and, if we see it, we could consider buying the stock, right then, at its wing tip low.
17) Oh, what the heck, I'll look at one of the top losers. Turns out, it's Intel. This is a list of giant companies. Well, apparently, Intel, is down today. You can't even see it, in the five year chart. Over the course of five years, it's, well, a bit up, and this last year, it's been going up and down a bit, making sort of a plateau, or ledge. Well, anyway, it's up in the last month, from $30, to $35, and it made a sharp bottom at $30, and, you know, I did say, don't buy stocks that are up in the short term - not that I'm necessarily right, but I think $30 is a better price for Intel than today's $35.
18) Not that I'm interested in Intel, or Visa. Here we've seen what a dramatic rally looks like, in this kind of stock: up 25% in a month. I've already said I want four times that result, at a minimum. Now, you should invest in Intel, and Visa, but you should do it the way Warren Buffett says, and put most of your savings, I suppose, or, at any rate, your investment dollars, in an S&P 500 index fund (Warren says he likes Vanguard). You will now own 500 companies like Intel and Visa, and over the long term, you will be rewarded. Here's how the long term works: for the first ten years, you will get a modest return, but after 20 years, you might have a million dollars ... and, if you hold on for 30 years, you might have 10 million dollars, and if you hold on for 40 years, you might have 100 million dollars. That's long term investing. As you hold on longer and longer, the rate of increase in the value of your investments accelerates. If you can hold on for a long time, you will end up with a geyser of money ... but, you know, with geysers, you have to wait, for who knows how long, while nothing much happens.
19) And I still say, put a lot of money in an index fund, if you can, but put a little in ... what we're looking for is a kind of geyser field, too, only it's a little tiny one, or, at any rate, small, that produces lots of little geysers. And, if you don't study those geysers, you won't be able to predict them, and they'll be done erupting before you have a chance to make any money, but if you do study it - I've sketched out the beginning of that somewhat challenging process - you can learn to predict the eruptions: when they might happen, and how big they might be.
20) I modified my scan. I scanned for stocks between $3.59 and $3.99, and got 147 stocks. I ran the scan - it says "get scan results" or something, and you click that - and got the list, and at the top of the list there's an option to download ... an excel file ... and I did that, and saved the resulting text file, naming it - I'll just show you - 20141105w1105_147_pennies. (See those magic numbers?!) Then I made a copy of it with the name 20141105w1106_147_pennies_working. I'll use that for taking notes.
21) Let's look at a stock. Just from the list I can see that "ACGYF","SUBSEA 7 S A SHS","","","","$10.90","-5.30%","-16.71%","-50.45%","3.8B" is was trading, yesterday, at $10.90. Hey, wait a minute, I scanned for stocks under $4. What gives? Ohhhh. This stock is down 50%, not only in a year, but in a day. Well, I wonder what I ought to make of that.
22) Hmm. Very little trading today. Very little trading in a five year period. There's a chart pattern, but ... no reason to follow this.
23) Next on the list is "ADNC","Audience Inc","NASD","Technology","Communications Equipment","$3.77","-37.17%","-48.85%","-64.63%","85.6M". OK, ADNC did trade actively all day. You can see that on the one day chart. And, on a three month chart, you can see it has been trading, oh, maybe 50,000 shares a day ... so, now that the price is under $4, that amounts to about $200,000 going in and out a day. If you wanted to invest, oh, say, that $20 I earlier mentioned, there's not any question you could do it. So, now, on the five year chart, you can see that ADNC just, maybe, yesterday, even, kind of fell off a cliff - it's just a little cliff, you can see, in the chart, that's part of a mountain. Now, it's been my general observation that stocks that are going down in the short term, and steeply down, are, let me put it this way, tricky. But I also can't completely shake the idea that they might be worth following. In fact, if I look at the early days of this chart, the stock, in 2012, fell off a considerably larger cliff than the one it just fell off of now ... and then, in fairly short order, it made a bottom, just above $5, and then a rally, for six months, which carried to $16. If you had bought after that 2012 cliff, and then sold near the 2013 top, you would have doubled your money in six months. That's not worth it, if you are just investing $20. Commissions will eat up all your profit. But, it's interesting to look at.
24) I mean, would you have had any way of knowing, in 2013, that a top was forming? Well, I will tell, from my observations, speaking somewhat subjectively, is that cliffs actually do represent opportunities. They seem to produce a return to near the cliff top with some regularity. They could perhaps be treated as short term buying opportunities, which predict a rally to a certain level. I plan - somewhat as an academic exercise, to study cliffs in more detail. Predictable kinds of things happen at the bottom of cliffs, which might be able to give us more clues, and make an investment truly worthwhile ... If we learn, we might be able to watch the action after a cliff and pick a moment that will make buying worthwhile, a moment that will predict, with reliability, a rally, to the target price.
25) But, uh, in this instance, it's a small cliff ... it might produce a double in a short time ... but not more. In fact, in the middle of 2013, ADNC fell off yet another cliff, another small one. And after that, it performed just as I'm saying, thought there was no profit in it, its being such a small cliff.
26) Here is my actual prediction regarding ADNC, as of today, November 5, 2014: Based on its history of cliffs, and its overall downness - at an all time low, now - I think ADNC is headed for an extended low price even. It's going to go down some more, and then it's going to stay down, down a lot, maybe, for a while. This, frankly, is not the kind of stock we are looking to buy. What I mean is, it's not the right moment to buy this stock. Actually, based on the volume numbers, it kind of is the kind of stock we want to buy, but we need to understand ...
27) This idea of an extended low price event ... is, perhaps, the key. Today, right now, we are looking at what we think will turn out to be the beginning of an extended low price event. If, somehow, we can keep an eye on ADNC for ... a while ... looking for certain signs ... maybe as long as a number of years ... quite a while, perhaps ... and if, then, it is still ... basically, this might be enough ... actively trading ... then it kind of will be the kind of stock we really are looking for.
28) There, I have gone and told you what kind of stock, what kind of chart pattern, we are particularly looking for. Let me describe it in more detail. Stocks can go down and down and down. ADNC is trading at $4, down from $20. I think it will go down to ... $1? ... $.50? ... $.25? But at some point it might make a bottom and then jump upward, and then, after that, it might come gradually down again, towards that bottom ... and then it might make a bottom ... a little bit above that earlier bottom. And there are pointy bottoms, and flatter bottoms, and where the first bottom might have been more pointy, this one might be flatter, even considerably flatter. Flat bottoms might have little spiky tops and bottoms in them, but maybe the best are more like tiny rolling hills, at the bottom of a big slope. And then prices might bump up a little. And then they might come back down, and another flat bottom might form. Then they might bump up a little again, and then they might stay up, for a while, making a pattern like a wide ledge, a mesa. And then, after a while, they might drop again. The bottom level is already established, where those flat bottoms were, and now, indeed, it flattens out again. It flattens out even more, so that it's not so much rolling hills as just ... a plane. At that time, I think, it's time to buy some.
29) Here's an example. It's my best trade to date, but it's just an example of my theory, that I've been trying to master for years and years. Blue Fire Renewables. I found the stock quite a few years ago, looking at very, very cheap stocks. I thought, based on the chart, it was going to go up 100,000 times. That was my theory at the time. I think that theory might represent something too good to be true. But interesting stocks start out, on long term charts, at very, very high prices, and then spend long periods of time at very, very low prices. Anyway, BlueFire was actively traded, and I rather liked their business model, which I read about in the annual report. True, I liked it for sentimental reasons, but ... I'm intrigued by the ethanol business, or economy, and cellulosic ethanol would be a very good thing, like heaven, and they have what sound like well developed plans to build some rather large test plants, and they also have interested partners in Asia - that must have taken some doing!
30) Anyway, I bought some, maybe a little more than I should have, $250 worth, or something like that. And then it went down and down and down. This lasted for years. Well, I was stuck, so I stayed with it. After all, I do kind of believe in the company. And it continued to trade actively, and, after a while, there was no reverse split or anything like that ... I still had all my shares. And now it was making flat bottoms at a lower level. I bought some more. I doubled my investment. Actually, I maybe quadrupled my shares, but at a lower price, so I only only doubled my investment. I was, really, proud I did that ... even though I wasn't any longer kidding myself that I know where the ultimate bottom was going to be, or, in any sure way, the company's prospects. I was just sticking with something, sticking with an idea that it was something good. Nothing had overtly changed. The company still seemed to be working on its plans. I got, actually, a positive feeling from the new 10ks. Everything was just the same. They were very guarded about their prospects, but, if you read the whole thing, they were still working, and still had a little money to work with, still had prospects (for financing), everything was still basically in place, they were being frugal but active with their limited funds.
31) I'm pretty sure prices went down again. I sort of thought I had lost my money. But after the most recent decline, to low, low prices, I thought to myself, I absolutely should buy more. Then, some months later, a year later, even more later than that? I took another look. The insiders, people very close to the company, were actively buying. That was the big new thing I noticed. Financing still looked in doubt, and was needed, if they were to do anything. Actually, I think they had cancelled a project. But, at the same time, they were now fully committed, more committed than ever, to a larger project. And there was a possibility, that's how they put it, just mentioning it once, of financing from China. I started to feel, well, optimistic. And the price, right then, was really, really low. In fact, it was just the kind of pattern I just described, complete with early big bottom, intermediate flat bottoms, plateau, and final low price plain. I asked my wife to buy some - I was out of cash in my account - and she reluctantly bought $100 worth, 20,000 shares at $.0047, or one half cent.
32) Some time went by. One day, frustrated by things generally, I became just boorish towards my long-suffering wife. She was furious, and refused to talk to me at all, that night, the morning. I, taking my medicine, just shut my mouth and concentrated on my own business, for a change. My business was meditating, meditating on a perfect, improbably outcome. Then, in the evening, she was still livid, and didn't want to say a word to me, but she still acknowledged: "did you see what BlueFire did today?" It had doubled in a day, or something. Maybe it was more than that.
33) Neither of us could remember anything about our last purchase. Was it a long time ago? Was it at a high price? We looked at the chart, and BlueFire was up a ton from some earlier extremely low prices. If only we had bought it then! Gradually it dawned on us: we did!!!!!!!!
34) Our $100 investment in BlueFire had turned into $1600 in one month. A month, and a day.
35) Now, I was quite concerned. At the beginning of this year, I bought a different stock, which I had found had a very compelling short term pattern (like the pattern I described, but lasting only a few months), and I had bought $500 worth, at what I was convinced was a very good price, and, sure enough, it had, two weeks later jumped up, 3 times in one day. I looked at my daily account statement, and I suddenly had a bunch of money! It was shocking.
36) Well, at that time, I had no idea what to do. And then next day, that stock was down a lot. I still didn't know what to do. I kind of, well, got distracted. The stock went up nearly to the top a week or two later, but I wasn't watching. Then, by the time I started watching again, it was going down and down and down. Now, today, I have a $250 loss in that stock. I'm not happy about it! I had a $1000 gain, and now, a loss. I mean, it's a good company. It'll probably come back. Study Warren Buffett, and learn how to wait. But, really, I should have known that was a top. I'm a student of chart patterns. That stock made a top
pattern. I had talked my wife's ear about that pattern, but, when it formed, I hesitated. I even drifted off.
37) Now, the BlueFire pattern was much more powerful. The sideways action had extended for a year, maybe two. But a top pattern was forming - just the exceptional sharp up move begins it - and more of it formed over a couple of days. I had suggested we might want to sell it. Now I thought we probably should, not because of any problem with the long term picture, but because, when a stock goes up very sharply, it will probably then go down rather sharply, even if only for a brief time. If I could sell at a top, here, and then buy it back at a considerably lower price, I wanted to do that. But I wasn't sure. Sharp rallies like this one probably are the beginning of something. Even bigger moves will probably follow. I mean, they'll be bigger, though probably not as fast. Back and forth I went. Anyway, my wife, bless her, suggested selling half her shares, and I took her up on that. And then I sold all my shares. I had 7500. Turns out, I exactly broke even. I did not loose my money! And that's even though initially bought way too high.
38) A couple of days later, with the proceeds from my break even transaction, I was able to buy 20,000 shares at .3, after selling at .8. Basically, I managed to reduce my entry price by 60%.
39) I've become quite interested in these kinds of short term fluctuations. I mean, I follow some day traders who are only interested in short term fluctuations, and they make, oh, maybe 30% on a trade. I just made 1800% on a trade. What they're doing is a little silly, although they seem to be doing OK at it. But, they do talk about these very short term chart patterns, and I'm kind of impressed, so I've been paying attention. I'm not interested in 30% moves that happen all the time, but maybe I can time a 60% down move, a 200% up move to follow, if I happen to be watching it develop. I'm going to keep watching these kinds of patterns, to the best of my ability. I need to work on my ability to watch them. That's what I'm doing right now, looking at this list of 147 stocks.
40) On my list I'm noting that ADNC is beginning an extended low price period. "elp coming", maybe, is what I'll write. I'm itching to look at the next stock.
41) I need to cover some other stuff, though. We've seen how, with a bit of ingenuity, we can use the Scottrade scanner to search for stocks to watch. (The Scottrade scanner, covers the market very completely. It covers penny stocks completely. That's one thing I like about it.) But what does it mean to follow a stock. For me it means looking at the chart, if possible every day. Maybe every day for a long time I'll look and say "not yet", but someday I might look and say, "um, now!" Well, Scottrade will show you very complete charts, but looking at them is time consuming. If you want to follow a lot of stocks, you'll need something more.
42) I've actually had decent results using just ordinary notebook paper. Here's what I was doing: if I was interested in the stock, I wrote the symbol, neatly at the beginning of a line. And then, I sketched out a chart, still staying on that one line. So, it's a tiny, tiny chart. But you would be surprised. You can sketch out a very informative chart, even of the long term situation. You can note key prices and dates, and it can be quite complete. Your tiny charts do have an advantage. You can include only relevant information.
43) For one thing, if you sketch the long term chart, using only, say, a fifth of the line's length - we're talking about a line on a page of notebook paper - that long term chart will update very slowly. If you leave a little space at the end, that space could last you months, even years. And after the long term chart, you can select an appropriate time period and sketch an intermediate term chart. What you want, now, is to be able to clearly see the last price and its relationship to recent past prices that you think are significant. Use a ball point pen, and write really small.
44) What you want to do is write one symbol per line. If you really want more room, write on every third line. The thing is, the more stocks you log this way on one page, the more stocks you can "scan", using, now, your eye balls, at a glance. You won't have to turn lots of pages, and everything you look at will have a ton of context. You'll be able to instantly pick out the stocks you want to watch every day and the stocks you want to check only from time to time. And then you can go to Scottrade, type in the symbols for the stock you want to check, get the latest chart, and you've got your price update.
45) I'm thinking you will want to make a note on your tiny charts, of the last time you updated. I'm imagining a line of tiny notations of the day of the month, whenever you update. If you're updating a chart daily, it'll read "1,2,3" etc. Of course, at the beginning of the month, you note the month, and at the beginning of a year, you note the year. You could make little dot marks if you didn't update that day. If you see a string of those, it might be time to update that chart. The open 3/4s of the line should be enough for months of updating. A line has a surprising amount of room for all sorts of notes if you're a tiny writer like me.
46) Using this system, my 147 stocks will take up, oh, 5 pages. I already just rejected one stock, and then listed another, so maybe it'll be fewer pages. I marked the rejected stock "ignore" on my text list.
47) I haven't used the notebook system for a while. I love it, and it's really good, but it is work, and I'm trying to minimize that kind of work. I just can't bring myself to dig out the notebooks. I'm trying to keep all of my notes on the computer. That way, I can go to the computer and get everything I need in that one place, and keep everything I need in that one place. And, to do that, I've been using a tool, which I think is a big help: Blogger.
48) So, at the beginning, I suggested a free tool, Scottrade. You have to deposit $500, but you aren't spending that money, and you can get it back (if you don't trade) any time - just close the account - and you now have access to the platform. Now I'm suggesting you create another kind of on line account, a Blogger account. It's easy. Go to Blogger.com and sign up. You might have to sort out your Google accounts and their respective emails, but I was able to manage it, so you can too. I mean, I hate that stuff. I'm terrible at it. But even I can manage.
49) Once you have set up an account, setting up a blog really is easy. Click the "create a blog" button, choose a name for your blog ("stock tracker"?), and a url (myinitialsstocktracker.blogspot.com?), and then choose the basic template. Next, you'll be invited to create a post.
50) OK, back to Scottrade. If you, at Scottrade, type in a stock symbol, or click on one from, say, your scan list, Scottrade will display a page, the page, the summary page, for that stock. And, on that page, there's a one day simplified price chart. Below that chart is a set of buttons that allow you to choose between assorted charts: the one day chart, a five day chart, a three month chart, a six month chart, a one year chart, and a five year chart. And below those buttons is a button that reads "embed". Choose the chart you want, say, the five year chart, and click the embed button. A snippet of code will display. It reads "
". Anyway, copy the whole thing to the clipboard, from the opening < sign to the closing > sign, and then go to your new post editor, at Blogger. You got that by clicking a New Post button. Title your new post, maybe, "147 pennies", and, find the "html" tab. Click that. You see, on Blogger, there are two editing frames. One is called "compose", and it's the "what you see is what you get" option. The other is the html mode, and then you have to learn a little bit of html. So, go to the html mode, and paste in your image tag, that you copied from Scottrade. I guess you could just leave it at that. The image tag, this bit of code, that you pasted in, is the code that will display an image, in this case, the updated latest version of whatever chart it was you were looking at. After you've pasted in this code, in the html editor, you can switch to compose mode, and you will see ... the chart.
51) Actually, notice that this chart doesn't show what the symbol is, or anything else about the stock except its price history for the period. Do this next: in html mode, type in "
the symbol". Don't type the beginning and ending quotation marks, and replace "the symbol" with the symbol for the stock.
52) If you aren't familiar with html, you can still see that we've specified a size, in pixels, and a color, for some text. The text is the symbol. The "
" part moves the chart - which is specified by its code - to a new line. Switch back to compose mode, and you'll see your symbol, in big green letters. (I like to type the symbol in small letters, not caps. I just think it looks better.)
53) Where is this going? Well, let's start here: If you want to follow this stock, I'd suggest adding all of its six charts to this blog post. I do plan to revise this suggestion in a minute, but, stay with me. Add each chart the same way: click its button on the Scottrade summary page, then get the code from the embed panel, then paste that code into the html mode in Blogger. Separate the image tags with
tags. Now you can go to compose mode and see all six charts, stacked up in your post. Already, your post is a very convenient place to get the latest charts for this stock. (To make sure you've got the latest charts, reload the page. I mean, the blog post. Reload it. Let me point you to a feature of Blogger: while you're logged in to Blogger, go to your blog, and, at the top of the page, you will see a link labelled "design". Click that, and look for a link labelled "settings". After clicking settings, choose "posts". On that page, change the "number of posts to display" setting to 1. Click "apply settings", and you're done. We are going to build a blog with lots of posts, each of which will have lots of pictures - lots of charts - in it. We're kind of testing our browser's ability to display lots of pictures on one page, so, to minimize that, at least let's only ask it to display one post at a time.) Once you are at a post, click the browser's refresh button to reload it. That'll update the charts. (If you just linked to the post from some other post, that'll update the charts, and you don't need to reload the page.)
54) Where is this going? Well, you could give yourself the goal of adding ten symbols to this post. Each symbol gets a set of six charts. Don't forget to add the symbol. If you don't, you'll never know what stock those charts are for, and you'll just have to delete them. If you want an extra space between chart sets, add a second break tag, like this:
. Be sure to make all your additions in html mode.
55) But I predict this is going to cause you trouble, a little way down the road. Having ten symbols on one post, one page, is really nice, but, like I say, it's pushing a post's limit a little, and I'm not sure I want to push it much further. I mean, it can probably handle more, but ... And then, the solution is, start a new post, for ten more symbols. But, if you add post after post that way, your blog might end up in rather a muddle. I think I may have just figured out a solution.
56) Get yourself set, fasten your seat belts, and start creating a bunch of new posts. You're going to create 26 new posts, today. OK, cancel that. Too nightmarish.
57) Here's what you could do. First, start from the bottom of your list ...
58) Ach. Eek! That's not going to work, either.
59) Here's my final suggestion, and this is just a first start: right at the bottom of your blog, in the very first post, create a master list of the stocks you want to follow. You can do this in compose mode. On one line, list a symbol, company name, and the code for each chart for that symbol, from the Scottrade embed feature. Now, I have to explain how to get that code. Remember how, in the image tag from the embed code, there was a url in the source section? It starts out http://www.scottrade.com, and then it has a bunch of other stuff, and then, right at the end, there's a cluster of numbers and capital letters. That's a hexadecimal number, and it's the code for that chart.
60) What you are doing now is saving just those chart codes, with each symbol, in a list, and then later, this is where you'll go for those codes, when you want to put those charts in a post. You'll have to add the image tag, and the rest of the url, for each chart, but you will find, for specific reasons, doing it this way saves you tons of time. It'll make the job, which otherwise would be hard, a lot easier. You can make a note of the body of the url at the top of your list, and copy it from there when you need it.
61) OK, it's been a long, long day, and I'm done. Chapter 1.
62) For those of you, readers, who are not necessarily finding it so easy to follow this stuff about using Blogger, I am going to go over it again, and try to add more clarity. In fact, I think there's some magic we can do with Blogger HTML.
63) Late breaking: an hour or so ago my Facebook page suddenly went "bubloop". I had a message. It was from my honey, and it said "did you check out ABMC?" So, I did. ABMC is a little tiny biomedical company I first got interested in years ago, but it never did anything. Well, perhaps because I had a small amount of money in it, it sort of stayed on my watch list, and then, recently, last month, I looked at some of those old stocks to watch, and really tried to pick some making sideways extensions, and ABMC was a pretty good example. We talked it over, and ended up buying $100 worth, I think, at $.119, I think. It was a little tricky to buy it. It's not exactly heavily traded, and I had to guess from sketchy intraday charts what limit price to use, but we did manage to buy it, at a low price ... and then, that was that. I actually (using my current version of the Blogger system) was able to check it, every day, and the the last few days have been intertesing, like, something was starting to happen - even though the price dropped a little. I was, like, that's a good pattern. Well, today, ABMC spiked, in the middle of the day, to .9 - all the way from .1, and on kind of a volume surge. And out of a "plane" pattern. Remember I mentioned those. Very flat price action for, really, weeks. It really does look like the beginning of a move - a super-classic breakout. Now, I'm not 100% certain about this, but I think we may end up buying another batch of shares, if we can get them at today's close, .13. Just another $100 worth. This is a policy I've developed, and I think it's kind of important, not that you follow it, but that you know about it. It'll help you better understand these patterns. Oh, I forgot to mention: ABMC, after spiking to .9 (it actually kind of surged, on the 1 day chart), dropped all the way back to .13. OK, I kind of mentioned it. On the one day chart, it looks pretty funny. A spike, to be sure. And on the long term chart, it looks, well, kind of amazing. Spikes can be deceptive, but, this one has interesting qualities.
64) So, I really can't continue. I do want to list the topics for the future from 63:
65) Rework the Blogger method, see 62. Blogger list creation is 59 and 60.
66) Discuss spikes and breakouts. What do they predict?
also
67) The ethics of penny stock trading.
