Portfolio changes : AHCI and SODA

August 3, 2011

AHCI, a home care staffing company which I have previous written up here, has been bought out at $3.90. I liquidated my entire position at $3.83 instead of waiting  for the acquisition to close. This is a gain of around 50% over 7 months.  There are substantial synergies between the acquirer and AHCI, and I view […]

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SODA : A bubbly short

July 14, 2011

Starved of yield in the bond and money markets, investors are now frantically bidding up any stock which can deliver growth in the recessionary climate. Sodastream’s stock is a beneficiary of this phenomenon, driven by its past success in Sweden and its impressive growth in the US. However, this is not the first time this […]

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LNKD : The short that got away

June 13, 2011

Recently, a flurry of articles have discussed the pricing of the LinkedIn IPO, whether the investment banks screwed up and underpriced the IPO, or whether the IPO was priced correctly. These articles have piquéd my interest, and after some research into IPO pricing, I believe that I have come up with a reasonable framework for […]

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A short note on recent shorts : NOG, LFT, SODA

June 1, 2011

I have recently started shorting stocks again, and this post is a summary of how my short positions have been doing. Because I just started shorting, I decided to go slow to see if any problems will come up. I have just 3 shorts, NOG, LFT and SODA, and together, they make up around 5% […]

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UFS : Paper on the cheap

May 23, 2011

I usually write about a stock idea about 1-2 weeks after I have finished acquiring a full position. I do my write-up on the weekend after I am fully invested, and then publish it several days later. I find that a brief delay of 1-2 weeks typically does not matter. More often than not, the […]

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HRB : Mortgage repurchase tempest

May 18, 2011

HRB stock has taken a stumble recently after it was revealed that a group of bond investors are attempting to force HRB to repurchase subprime mortgages issued by its erstwhile subsidiary SCC during the housing boom. Estimates of $12B in losses to HRB, which is 2 to 3 times HRB’s market cap, have caused a […]

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ETM : Quarterly report update

May 14, 2011

ETM stock dived recently after the release of their 10Q. I gave the report a quick read to see what precipitated the decline. Although revenue is up in an odd–numbered year (unusual because revenue tends to be down in odd-numbered years due to an absence of election advertising), net income declined precipitously. Reasons given by […]

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Can an amateur outperform Wall Street professionals?

May 11, 2011

I have been investing on my own for 11 years now. There have been frightening moments, like the 50% decline in 2009, but by and large, I have outperformed the indexes handily, often by huge margins. I have never found a year when I could have done better simply by sticking to an index fund. […]

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Should a regular Joe manage his own portfolio?

May 4, 2011

Baruch at Ultimi Barbarorum has sparked a debate in the blogosphere about whether the average guy should invest on his own. The detractors, such as David Merkel at the Aleph blog, say that investing is hard and not for amateurs (although I should point out that Merkel’s mother is apparently an excellent amateur investor, as […]

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TKLC : Secular vs transient decline in telecommunications routers

April 27, 2011

Tekelec makes routers for telephone companies. Its core expertise is in the area of signaling protocols, which carries control information about the underlying telephone traffic, including the telephone number dialed to/from and the billing number of the call. Signaling protocol allows features such as number portability, call forwarding, voice mail, call waiting etc. Wireless phones […]

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