>>65
Do not feel bad for being suspicious. Actually that is what imo is a key element of my success. I am suspicious of everything I see and hear and look for confirming evidence. Someone who takes others words at face value can easily get into trouble.
Also being suspicious will aid you in your search for good companies, when you are looking for a stock to buy, most average investors look for excuses to buy the company. They try to confirm their beliefs or feelings on a pick or stock.
I do the opposite and look for excuses not to buy the company and as soon as I find one sufficient I walk away and start looking at the next company.
There will never be a shortage of other options to invest in if you find a reason not to buy a particular company, even if you are relatively certain that it will rise, and you miss it because of your concerns, it is nothing at all to be concerned with missing that opportunity. Even though you missed that opportunity it is masking the fact that you also missed that risk, focus as much on the profits you miss as the risks you miss.
By searching until you find a pick, with no rational reason not to buy, you limit your downside risk to the greatest degree and play the best defense, while also being in an offensive position.
IF you predict the market will react in a certain way with a stock and it does not do as you expect. That is a red flag that you are wrong about something, and it is time to exit. Set goals for yourself and if the companies performance is not matching your time stops.. then you gotta get out before Mr. Market really whacks you.
It's easier to gain informational advantages on comapnies the smaller they are.
I think my predictive powers are pretty good, but even I know I will never be able to outguess the market on large caps like AAPL. Not competing against thousands of analysis and quants all making their own predictions and sloshing their money around. I might be able to identify a fair long term value for the company though, if I were prepared to sit long term and wait for a payday. But i am not.
I might also add that i am starting to sell my ANIK now. I am very good at predicting the start of runs, and stock bottoms. However I never really know how far human madness will carry a stock price under positive momentum, so I almost never see the top stock price, I usually get out as the fundamental disconnect i first identified erodes under price appreciation.
I am taking a lot of the money out of ANIK and I bought NOG. NOG is another stock that has reached technical AND fundamental bottom, and that combined with historical data analysis I have conducted, and an overview of their value and management's increasing execution effectiveness, leads me to conclude NOG will rally in the range of 16-18 over the next few weeks. The primary downside risk I see to NOG is the price of oil and natural gas in the US market. Even though I expect NOG to outperform oil and gas by a heavy margin going forward. I will be monitoring these prices carefully and have some oil and natural gas price stops if oil breaks 89.75 dollars a barrel to the downside, I will exit NOG, if not.. I will hold it to my price range with a max time limit of one-two months based on relative performance.
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