Profitmonkey.net

Microhoo! What happened there?

This is not really a true technical article, but I thought I had to put in my two cents. I'm really freaked about about what Yahoo! and Jerry Yang are doing. Yang is either slightly too greedy, slightly confused about his own company's worth, or has a slightly big ego. I've been reading on the yahoo meassage boards how so many investors are about to get hammered and I really feel for them.

Here's something interesting, it seems some disgruntled investor has posted their Yahoo shares for sale on ebay. This is hilarious. They are only excepting Google checkout as method of payment. Too funny!

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=150243859197

I've been on a bit of a hiatus, so it's time for the monkey to make a comeback. See you soon boys!

The Profit Monkey.

The Apple does not fall far...

Several of you active monkeys out there have sent in some requests for me to take a look at 'The apple of your eye,' AAPL. OK, stupid joke, but I took a gander into the little gem, and I can't make heads or tails of it. This may surprise you, but based on my technicals, I don't care much for AAPL. This is one volatile SOB of a stock. I tried to apply every technical indicator that I could find, and nothing seems to work very well.

The issue is that many trades make small gains after riding huge swings, but the indicators are too slow to pick up on the volatility and can't take advantage of the massive gains left on the table. This stock would require a lot of babysitting, but it would be well worth it. This is one hell of a day trading stock... if you've got the cash ... and the balls... or... it could definitely be more of a long term play.

So the monkey is not going to trade this stock, although the monkey is also drooling about the huge profits (and losses if you're not careful) in AAPL.

Good hunting people,

The Profit Monkey.

The Long and Short of It!

In my continuing and fruitful quest to educate the masses on trading bananas, fig leaves and the overall volatility of monkey poo, I bring you a not so technical explanation to trading... both long positions and short positions. This really is the basics of trading 101. So read on my monkey apprentice...

Should this be part of any share purchase plan?

My good friend Ybot had submitted a request a while back for the monkey to look at a couple stocks in a sharp and technical way. Ybot probably forgot that he even did this as it's been some time since his request to profitmonkey.net, but I will venture to review his selection. The stock here to look at is Solium Capital Inc. (SUM.TO) a nice small cap stock with what would seem like a lot of potential on the fundamental side of things, but not so much on the technical. This little stock doesn't really trade much (average 3 month volume was 7,200 shares) so complex technical analysis really doesn't work here. When it comes to stocks like this, it's the simple things in life (a nice glass of prune juice, a leisurely swim across the English channel, or a simple technical indicator) that makes all the difference. This stock calls for old faithful - the moving average coupled with a regression analysis. "Say what..." you exclaim?

The Ever Wonderous Moving Average

I have decided that it's time to start writing a few articles on various technical indicators, terms and tools that we technical monkeys like to use to better understand the stock charts we look at. So, I'm going to start off with one of the primary technical indicators there is - The Moving Average (MA). If you are at all unfamiliar with this chartings tool, or if you just feel like spending the next few minutes staring at the screen, then you've made it to the right place!

The MA is quite simple really... it's a widely used indicator showing the average value of a security's price over a set period of time. In other words, you would take a stocks closing price over a set number of days and average them out on the final day. The primary use of Moving Averages (both short-term and long-term) is to understand the momentum of the stock and to describe low and high points of the stocks movement. In other words… support or resistance.

Tracking The Paper Trades

Everytime I cover a stock here on profitmonkey.net and I talk about entering a position, I'll track it in the Paper Trades section of the site so that everyone can see how the Profit Monkey is doing. Let's see if I know what I'm talking about... ;-)

The Profit Monkey

$8 going once... going twice...sold!

The technical requests just keep coming in and the profit monkey loves it. Thanks Paula for another brilliant stock to look at.

In the online auctions world, there are only a few big players, and one of them is BIDZ.com, Inc. (BIDZ). This stock has seen some truly spectacular climbs and dips in its share price in the last while. Since it's only been trading on the NASDAQ since May 07, there isn't a great deal of data to work with, but we'll monkey around with some numbers and see what we can come up with, although currently (as with the rest of the market) the trend is down. My recommendation - leave this stock alone for now. There was a perfect short entry point on 01/15/08 at $10.80, but by now we've missed that water slide.

Get your paper trades...

Here is where we are as of February 20, 2008

Stock	Trade Date	Position	Price IN	Date OUT	Price OUT/Current	P/L
EBAY	10/3/07	SHORT	$39.20	N/A	$27.24	$11.96
BQI	12/17/07	SHORT	$4.43	2/6/08	$3.26	$1.17
BQI	2/6/08	LONG	$3.26	2/15/08	$3.82	*$0.56*
BQI	2/15/08	SHORT	$3.82	N/A	$3.91	-$0.09
BIDZ	1/15/08	SHORT	$10.80	2/5/08	$8.44	$2.36
HIMX	1/23/08	LONG	$4.95	1/24/08	$5.15	*$0.20*
HIMX	1/24/08	SHORT	$5.15	2/1/08	$5.00	$0.15
HIMX	2/5/08	LONG	$4.97	2/19/08	$5.28	*$0.31*
HIMX	2/19/08	SHORT	$5.28	N/A	$5.59	-$0.31

Note: Font in italics symbolizes a closed trade in the table above.

Is Himax just as flat as its monitors?

There is a small holding company that has been monkeying around the stock market for some time. This stock hasn't had a lot of publicity, and it could be a hidden gem, with emphasis on the word hidden. I'm talking about Himax Technologies Inc.
(HIMX). This stock has been trending down since 07/03/07 and wasn't doing too much, but has seen some interesting activity of late. The profit monkey is intrigued. On 01/14/08, HIMX had an incredible breakout as can be seen on the chart below.

So you want to know about oily sand?

It has come to my attention (or rather, I have been asked to review) a small firm in our little Canadian country side called Oilsands Quest, Inc BQI. There is a bunch of information out on the net on the fundamentals of this up and comer company and other talk of the future change in SEC regulations that could change the whole valuation structure of these oil sands players. Even the talking heads are saying BUY, BUY, BUY, but the monkey doesn't care about all this because it's the technicals that speak to me.

If we look at a one month window, BQI has only been worth one thing... shorting. The stock has been trending down since the main momentum indicators turned south on 12/14/07. Had I been paper trading this stock (big emphasis on the word HAD), I would have moved into a short position at $4.43 on 12/16/07 and currently been looking at a nice gain as the last close was $3.75. But alas, hind-sight is 20/20 and I could just go on and on, but the fact of the matter is my stop loss would be placed tomorrow morning (01/22/08) at $4.42 (might as well make a penny ;-) and I'd wait to see where this goes. Based on the overall market trend, down seems to be that way as this stock is definitely not a trend setter.