With The Band

http://biz.yahoo.com/special/allbiz110106.html

I’ve got three more years to make it. Watch me.

I saw these…. in the display case in the lobby were Saddam Hussein’s golden guns, retrieved by soldiers in the current Iraq war.

Pretty neat.

Someone finally wrote the obvious. Fascinating op-ed about the two-faced nature of Arab nations (click to read).

I caved. I couldn’t handle Yahoo hurting anymore.

Bought Arena Pharmaceuticals and Sears Holdings, based on Cramer recs. I have to become more independent with my investing, but I currently lack that time/discipline/know-how to go out on my own. But as it happens, the one stock I have come up with myself, Teva Pharmaceuticals, is still the star!

One of the upsides to having an hour and a quarter round-trip commute is I listen to a lot of podcats. When I first got my iPod, I first loaded it up with lots of music-related podcasts, drum and bass sets, punk shows, etc…. But nowadays I end up listening to a lot more political and investing shows. Wow I’m all grown up! One show I really enjoy is an audio version of NBC’s sunday morning political talk show Meet The Press. For the past month or so continuing on to the election, they hold debates between the Dem and Rep senatorial candidates in key states. It’s amazing how things have changed from even as recently as last year. Instead of Republicans taking the offensive and attacking Democrats for not supporting the president and the war on terrorism, instead, Republicans try and separate themselves from the President, while it’s the Democratic candidate who always comes out the clear and sensible candidate. The tables have really turned. Each debate Read the rest of this entry »

As good as life may be. Sometimes you just have crappy days. Despite Teva Pharm and Gamestop doing incredibly well today, Yahoo tanked. The CEO has got to resign, it’s like having an 80 year old half-blind man driving a Ferrari.

Nothing is working at work. We have no idea why. We deploy next week.

And it’s still Sukkot. I’m sick of Jewish Holidays.

I could make my life very simple like most of America’s workforce. Work my 9 to 5, and then avoid any kind of stress and decision making outside of those hours. Nope, I pile it on.

So I’m in the stock market. I’m at a point in my life where all I’m paying for is myself, so there is no real stress, so after I get my paycheck and pay cell phone/rent/car insurance/car loan x2/credit cards x3 I have a chunk of change left over. So I am able to invest a good amount. My first buy was TEVA Pharmaceuticals, which has been doing spectacularly well so far, and I have a feeling it’s stock I am going to hold on to for a while, not only because it’s a well-run generic drug company serving an aging population, but because it’s ISRAELI. I also own one share of GameStop, which also owns EB Games. With the Wii coming out, PS3 coming out (maybe) and XBox 360, every needs games, so every one goes to GME.

…And then I bought Yahoo. Oy vey. What the hell am I doing. All the other stocks I was thinking of (Toll Brothers, Costco, Crox, Cisco) have been doing incredibly well… but I bought Yahoo. In the face of Google totally wiping them out. But I believe in Yahoo. I believe that one day, Google is gonna get crushed, either by their extensive private data collection efforts or by some new competitor that absolutely destroys them. Yahoo has turned themselves from a search company to a true web content portal. I find that I lot of my time, especially dealing with equity related stuff, is on Yahoo, and I actually have my portfolio running on there, so I’m checking on how my boys are doing every five minutes or so.
If you aren’t investing in stocks and you have at least a few hundred or a G rolling around in your bank account, what the hell are you doing? INVEST.

Blink…

It’s back. After a two-plus year hiatus from blogging, I am back in action. When I stopped blogging mid-junior year, I assumed that it would be for good. My old journal was helpful for me in terms of growing. It was an avenue of releasing any feelings I had, instead of keeping them bottling up inside. But I outgrew it, and realized that instead of just keeping my thoughts to myself and just blurting them out on a semi-anonymous medium, just be open. Plus, I learned that nothing is anonymous. Even though I may have left names out, I learned that people are smart enough to figure out who or what you are talking about. Some of my friends played guessing games with each other as to who I am pissed off at in a particular post. And, surprise surprise, bitching someone out in a weblog and them finding out about it at the same time everyone else does will NOT solve the problem.
But things have changed drastically for me now. Well, I can always rewind a year and think of how different my life was. But here I am, graduated, job, apartment, girlfriend, massive car loan… I’m a very different person than the angry quiet kid who blogged back then. Instead of just talking about my feelings, recapping what I did, I hope to actually convey some knowledge and intelligence across. I’m no longer dealing with insane people in extracurricular activities, but instead I’m in a high-stress work environment where I’m challenged every day to fill an ever-growing role. I’m not concerned over my performance in class, but my performance in the stock market. I’m not thinking about what my first job after college is going to be… but what the next step is, and what do I have to do to get there. So this blog will be different.

I think it’ll be fun for me, from time to time, to crack open my old weblog and see what I wrote, and see what has changed in myself. Maybe you’ll learn something too. I have, for a while has the motto that if I could do anything, I would go back in time a year or two and whoop my own ass.
Changes.