Two more weeks to give

First, thank you to the 10 people who have donated. I appreciate your generosity — no matter how much you gave.

Due to a pathetic response (only 10 donations) I am extending my 2011 Red Kettle Challenge, where I match every single online donation you make (up to a maximum of $10,000). My target was extremely ambitious, but I should hope that I can get at least another few donations. I have already matched the $1975 in donations that have been made.

Donate now

See the original post

This blog has a terms of use that is incorporated by reference into this post; you can find all my disclaimers and disclosures there as well.

The ReaperTrades 2011 Red Kettle Challenge

I ask you to join me in raising money for The Salvation Army; the money will be used in Detroit, a city that needs not just money but also love. I will match any gifts through my donation link 100% through December 15th, up to a maximum of $10,000. So if readers of this blog donate $8,000 by December 1st using my link, I will match that with my own $8,000 gift. So if you have benefited from this blog, please consider donating some of the money I have either saved you or helped you make.

Donate Now

I am far from the greatest trader or the richest trader in the world. But I still make much more money than I need, even after accounting for the absurd sums I sometimes spend on fancy restaurants. I do not feel that I need to apologize for my success. I do not feel like I took from anyone so I do not owe anyone anything. That being said, I have compassion for those who truly need and those who truly suffer, the poorest among us. If I cannot find it within myself to give out of my abundance, then I certainly do not love others.

If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.

Why the Salvation Army? I am familiar with their work and have given to them in the past and I know they are an effective organization helping some of the neediest people in the United States and throughout the world. For further details of why to give to the Salvation Army I defer to my favorite personal finance blogger, FreeMoneyFinance, whose $5k red kettle challenge was the inspiration for mine:

I’ve worked with and gotten to know Salvation Army people and organizations all across America. I’ve talked to the people who are part of the organization and the people they are helping (and I’m talking about real-life “needy” people on the streets of Grand Rapids, Atlanta, Detroit, and so on). So I know they are making a HUGE difference. Because I’ve seen their work first-hand, the Salvation Army is an organization I know I can fully support.

Now some of you will object to the fact that the Salvation Army is a Christian-based organization. If your personal convictions make you want to not give for those reasons, I respect that and I hope you give generously to the charity of your choice. But if you’ve read FMF for more than two seconds I think it’s pretty apparent that I have no problem giving to a charity that’s Christian-based. Plus the fact that I’ve seen their work in person makes the Salvation Army a no-brainer choice for me.

Others may be concerned that the Salvation Army spends the bulk (or even a large part) of their money on proselytizing people or only on those of their faith. I can say with 100% certainty that this is not the case. Yes, it’s because of their faith that they help others, but they do not push their beliefs or force recipients to become Christians to get aid. They simply want to “do the most good” (their slogan) and that in and of itself is their reward. And as I’ve said, I’ve talked to many people they’ve helped and know they are doing good, selfless work to those who need the help most.

Others may wonder about the Salvation Army’s impact as an organization. Charity Watch gives them an “A-“, a pretty good grade (FYI, St. Jude’s and the Susan G. Komen Search for the Cure get B+, MDA and Livestrong get an A-). Again, I have no problems giving to them based on this measure either.

Disclaimer: Much of the above description of The Salvation Army was taken from the FreeMoneyFinance blog post on his kettle challenge and I found it better written than I could do on short notice. This blog has a terms of use that is incorporated by reference into this post; you can find all my disclaimers and disclosures there as well.

The new uptick rule (also known as the short sale restriction or SSR)

After the SEC reinstated a new version of the uptick rule following the 2008 financial crisis, there has been very little information available online. If you search for “uptick rule” most of the info you will find is on the old uptick rule. The current version isn’t really an uptick rule at all, but rather an upbid rule. This new version was first put into effect in November 2010.

Simply put, shares of a stock cannot be sold short at or below the best bid when the rule is in effect. The short seller must sell on the offer and wait for a buyer to fill his offer. The rule goes into effect when a stock’s price decreases by 10% or more from its previous day’s close. Once a stock has dropped 10% from its previous day’s close (even if just briefly dropping that far) the rule will then be in effect for the rest of the day and the next trading day. The rule can only be triggered during regular trading hours although if it is triggered it remains in force during after-hours and pre-market trading.

For those who use Interactive Brokers’ TWS platform, a little red circle will appear to the right of the stock description when the uptick rule is in effect. If you mouse over the red circle it will say “Short sale restriction is in effect from [date] to [date].”

In the screenshot below, IB TWS indicates that the uptick rule is in effect for PRGN with a little red circle to the right of the ticker.

ssr

There are some exemptions to the upbid rule but they do not apply to small traders. See this broker’s description of the exceptions.

The complete uptick rule can be found in this March 10th 2011 amendment to Regulation SHO (pdf).

I encourage reading the NYSE’s statement (pdf) about how it will enforce the uptick rule.

Disclaimer: No positions in any stock mentioned. This blog has a terms of use that is incorporated by reference into this post; you can find all my disclaimers and disclosures there as well.

2011 Super-mega-ultra pump and dump recap

I haven’t done any posts like this so far this year so I am going pretty far back. Please remind me in the comments of any big pumps I forget  and I’ll add them. See my last pump and dump recap from January to see some mailer pumps from the very beginning of the year.

Mailer Pumps

SPLM – $400k snail mail pump. See an image of the disclaimer here. The last part of the disclaimer is the most interesting: “”In order to enhance public awareness of Sentry Petroleum Ltd., and other companies profiled by WER [World Energy Report] through the distribution of this report, ECA [Energy Capital Advisors] paid WER four hundred thousand dollars. These funds were applied towards costs associated with creating, printing, and distributing this report. ECA will pay no additional sums. WER, ECA, and those associated with them may own shares and effect transactions in securities of Sentry Petroleum Ltd and other companies mentioned in this publication the sale of which could adversely affect the share price. The owner of ECA owns approximately zero point two six (0.36) percent of the outstanding shares Sentry Petroleum Ltd [sic] and will not sell any of those shares within ninety days of the date of this mailing.” [emphasis mine]

 

 

KNKT – $800k pump from Capital Financial Media (CFM). See post here (unfortunately the pump website is offline).

UTOG – $2.5m mailer pump. Trading was suspended by the SEC for two weeks at the beginning of June (a rare case where the SEC suspended trading in an active pump & dump). See website www.AmericanEnergyReport.com Disclaimer: “AmericanEnergyReport.com has been retained by an unrelated third party to perform promotional and advertising services intended to increase investor awareness of UnionTown Energy Inc. (UTOG). To date, AmericanEnergyReport.com has received two million five hundred thousand US dollars from an unrelated third party for performing these services. The services performed have included profiling the company on the AmericanEnergyReport.com website and issuing opinions concerning UTOG in newsletters and press releases. AmericanEnergyReport.com has received this amount as a production budget for advertising efforts and will retain amounts over and above the cost of production, copywriting services, mailing and other distribution expenses as a fee for our services. In addition AmericanEnergyReport.com expects to receive an additional two million dollars cash in future compensation for the continuation of the marketing program for an additional 3 months and to cover marketing vendors to pay for the costs of creating and distributing this report online in an effort to build market awareness, and AmericanEnergyReport.com will disclose any future compensation.”

 

LEXG – The greatest pump I have ever seen and probably one of the best ever. Note not just the price movement but the incredible volume — the value of stock traded on its last big up day exceeded $100m. This had a $3.29m budget disclaimed on these two websites: http://www.smauthority.com/video and http://www.thestockdetective.com/lexg/

Disclaimer: “Lithium Exploration Group, (LEXG), the company featured in this issue, appears as paid advertising, paid by Gekko Industries to provide public awareness for LEXG. … CM [Circuit Media] has received and managed a total production budget of $3,296,800 for this advertising effort and will retain any amounts over and above the cost of production, copywriting services, mailing and other distribution expenses, as a fee for its services. TSD [TheStockDetective] is paid $50,000 as an editorial fee from CM and also expects to receive new subscribers as a result of this advertising effort.”

Please note that unlike most of the stock charts on this page, the chart below is not log scale, to make seeing the price action during the pumps easier to see.

JAMN – An incredibly successful pump, the second most successful pump I have ever seen, after LEXG. This was pumped by HackTheStockMarket.com; see the pump page here (or here or here). The name and address information required by the CAN-SPAM law from this pumper changed multiple times, which leads me to believe it was all fake. HackTheStockMarket disclosed only $15,500 in payment for the promotion. The disclaimer was an image that is shown below.

Please note that unlike most of the stock charts on this page, the chart below is not log scale, to make seeing the price action during the pumps easier to see.

AVVC – $1.8m budget disclosed on this mailer pump. Lots of speculators / traders / idiots lost big going long on this stock — it was the first big pump failure following a string of very successful pumps early this year. Disclaimer: “CFM has received and managed a total production budget of $1,800,000 for this online advertising effort and will retain any amounts over and above the cost of production, copywriting services, mailing and other distribution expenses, as a fee for its services. Breakaway Stocks is paid $5,000 as an editorial fee from CFM and also expects to receive new subscriber revenue as a result of this advertising effort.” from this website.

LOGL – $1.275m mailer pump — see the SI pump mailer message board.

TBBC –  This was a large pump from multiple sources with over $800,000 in compensation. Following are those that I can find:

“Charles Payne’s Common Sense Newsletter received forty thousand dollars, as an editorial fee, from Creative Direct Marketing Group, Inc., which it received from the featured Company. This company was chosen to be profiled after Charles Payne’s Common Sense Newsletter completed due diligence on the company. Charles Payne’s Common Sense Newsletter expects to generate revenue and new newsletter subscribers and valuable exposure, the amount of which is unknown at this time, resulting from the distribution of this report. Creative Direct Marketing Group, Inc. received fifteen thousand, eight hundred dollars from the Company, for the costs of creating and distributing this report in an effort to build investor awareness.” from this pump website

“StockMarketLife.com has been retained by an unrelated third party whose principal is a shareholder of the featured company, The Brainy Brands Company Inc. (TBBC), to perform promotional and advertising services intended to increase investor awareness of TBBC. StockMarketLife.com expects to receive up to six hundred thousand US dollars from the unrelated third party for performing these services. The services performed have included profiling the company on the StockMarketLife.com website and issuing opinions, including Charles Payne’s report, concerning TBBC on this website, online marketing, in newsletters and press releases. StockMarketLife.com has received this amount as a production budget for advertising efforts and will retain amounts over and above the cost of the production, copywriting services, mailing, media buying and other online distribution expenses as a fee for our services.” This disclaimer was also in emails from GreenGainers.com and PowerPennyStocks.com, which all appear to be run by the same person/company.

“PennyStockRewards.com is a wholly owned subsidiary of Asset Development Strategies Corp.  Currently Asset Development Strategies Corp. has been compensated $50000.00 for this advertising program from a non-affiliated third party shareholder who will be selling stock in TBBC.”

WallStreetPennyStockAdvisors.com received $200,000

 

RYUN – I am not sure of the details of this pump.

AAGC – $1.26m budget disclosed. Absolute destruction. Michael Williams Market Movers was paid $20,000 by Citiglory Consultants Ltd and Citiglory paid $1,265,178 for the cost of the promotion — due to website troubles I lost my copy of the disclaimer (the bastards had it as an image that I had saved). See the online version of the mailer (no longer working).

TKDN – $1.4m budget disclosed. Absolute destruction. Disclaimer: “CFM has received and managed a total production budget of $1,400,000 for this online advertising effort and will retain any amounts over and above the cost of production, copywriting services, mailing and other distribution expenses, as a fee for its services. M3 Profit Accelerator is paid $3,000 as an editorial fee from CFM and also expects to receive new subscriber revenue as a result of this advertising effort.” (CFM = Capital Financial Media). See the online version of the mailer at SmallCapFortunes

TKDN is an even more impressive dump when considered over nine months (hardly the long-term!) it dropped from a high of about $1.34 to a low of $0.006 — a drop of 99.55%.

Note: on 12/19/2011 the pumps in this post run by the big three email pumpers were removed to a GoodeTrades Premium post and more info on those pumps was added.

Disclaimer: No positions. This blog has a terms of use that is incorporated by reference into this post; you can find all my disclaimers and disclosures there as well.

 

How to tell when a twitter user is an automated pump account

These were all tweeted one minute after the close today. These pumpers (that I had not heard of prior to today) disclaimed $179,999 in compensation for pumping AAGC (see the image of their disclaimer here). I am currently long 4000 shares of AAGC that I intend to sell within a few days.

Links to those tweets are below:

http://twitter.com/#!/AgressiveStocks/status/112261555768397824
http://twitter.com/#!/HomeRunStocks/status/112261549485338624
http://twitter.com/#!/TerrificStocks/status/112261540979286016
http://twitter.com/#!/QStocks/status/112261519676424192
http://twitter.com/#!/ToutSheet/status/112261515935092736
http://twitter.com/#!/TouchDownStocks/status/112261507194175488
http://twitter.com/#!/Buy_Stocks_Now/status/112261490114957312
http://twitter.com/#!/SeriousTraders/status/112261486411382785
http://twitter.com/#!/QSTwits/status/112261482397446145
http://twitter.com/#!/TinyGems/status/112261477758545920
http://twitter.com/#!/gotstocks/status/112261465133694976

Disclaimer: Long 4000 shares of AAGC that I intend to sell within a few days. This blog has a terms of use that is incorporated by reference into this post; you can find all my disclaimers and disclosures there as well.

Some facts about how stock promoters Golden Dragon Media & Pudong LLC work

All of the following is quoted from documents filed in this case stemming from the alleged misappropriation of some stock promoters’ email lists: OTC Solutions LLC , Golden Dragon Media Inc, and Pudong LLC v. John Does 1-50 (link to Justia summary).

First, check out the original complaint from June 29th, 2010.

Each Plaintiff has numerous lists (“Subscriber Lists”), comprising anywhere from 25,000 to 65,000 subscribers. Each list has grown as a result of significant marketing efforts by Plaintiffs, which includes Internet-based advertising costs in excess of $30,000 per day. Each Plaintiff has numerous lists (“Subscriber Lists”), comprisinganywhere from 25,000 to 65,000 subscribers. Each list has grown as a result ofsignificant marketing efforts by Plaintiffs, which includes Internet-based advertising costs in excess of $30,000 per day.
That is a pretty impressive list size, and by my count the pumpers named above have 20 different websites between them that are currently functioning (I am sure they have others that I am not aware of). Advertising costs of $30,000 per day translates to $10.95 million per year. That number seems high relative to the amount of compensation disclosed in these pumpers’ emails.

I will blog more on this lawsuit. Please leave a comment if you have any clue what happened to it though. The most recent update in PACER was from last December and nothing was filed to close the case in any way. Please check out most of the important filings on this case, which have been uploaded to Scribd.


The problem with front-running the likely pump & dump of EVGI

The problem is the most effective pumpers, if their pump is being front-run by speculators, will just delay the pump or even cancel it. Pennypic (Pudong LLC) canceled their pump of WTKN in January 2010. BestDamnPennystocks has delayed a couple pumps over the last year. Golden Dragon Media / Pudong LLC / Free Penny Alerts LLC delayed their pump of GGRI from June 6th of this year until June 27th after people started front-running it.

Everyone and their mother believes that EVGI will be the next BestDamnPennyStocks pump & dump … and that makes it more likely that those speculators trying to front-run that pump will get seriously burned. While BestDamnPennyStocks has previously pumped at least one stock (MDFI on April 19) despite a massive front-run, the risks if they pull the pump at the last minute are far greater than the potential gains. RAPT, pumped by BestDamnPennyStocks on February 9th of this year, was actually supposed to be pumped on January 11th. The problem is that lots of traders figured this out and started to front-run RAPT. The result? The pump was delayed and as a result RAPT dropped from .40 to .18 in one day.

Disclaimer: No position. This blog has a terms of use that is incorporated by reference into this post; you can find all my disclaimers and disclosures there as well.

Join me in Las Vegas on October 22nd to 24th

I will be speaking again this year at Timothy Sykes’ 2011 Las Vegas Pennystocking Seminar, held this year at The Venetian from October 22nd to October 24th. I will be one of a number of penny stock traders who will be speaking there. Last year was quite informative and I suspect this year will be even better. If you decide to come, enter coupon code “REAPER” to save a bit of money.

Disclaimer: This blog has a terms of use that is incorporated by reference into this post; you can find all my disclaimers and disclosures there as well. I receive an affiliate commission for anyone who signs up using my link / coupon code.

Day-Trader performance measurement

Unlike a hedge fund manager or a person with a ‘real’ job, a full-time day-trader needs to consider both his own pay and the returns he earns on his capital. A trader who spends a lot of time trading but has little capital will find that his ‘hourly wage’ is so low that he would have been better off not trading.

So unlike hedge fund managers or investors, I measure my performance in terms of imputed wages and return on capital. I have a minimum hurdle rate on each that I must meet to justify my continued trading. First, there is my imputed wage. As an intelligent and well-educated person with a good work ethic I could be expected to make a good wage at a real job. That being said, I have essentially no job/career experience and my education (an M.A. in cognitive psychology) is essentially worthless. After finishing my Master’s degree in mid-2007 (before the financial crisis came to a head) I succeeded in landing only one job interview, for a $33,000 per year dead-end job crunching data for the St. Louis Fed. I was not even offered that job. I ended up working for an acquaintance’s start-up company for low pay plus equity but left that after half a year to trade full-time.

Realistically, I would not expect to be able to make more than $30,000 per year if I were to get a ‘real job’. However, I am confident that I could grow that amount to over $50,000 within 5 to 10 years. Consequently, I set my ‘imputed wage’ at $50,000 a year.  Obviously a real job would have fringe benefits that would add value, but I assume that the benefits of trading, such as working for myself and not commuting and saving money on work clothes, roughly equal the fringe benefits I would otherwise receive. I subtract this imputed wage from my annual trading earnings before considering my investment performance.

Return on capital (annual percent return) is an important measure of return. However, you cannot buy groceries (or lunch at Per Se) with percent returns, only with dollars. So the smaller the capital, the less meaningful percent returns are in the real world. However, because I calculate an imputed wage that I subtract from my trading profits, when computing return on capital I only need to concern myself with percent returns and earning a decent return on my capital. Now, any good analyst knows that cost of equity is determined by the riskiness of the business (or trading strategy). So what is an appropriate cost of equity?

I think that it is a bit silly to calculate an exact cost of equity (the minimum investment return that is acceptable) as analysts do with public and private companies (see this slideshow on how to calculate them). A few important things to consider that will increase the cost of equity for a trader are: high maximum drawdowns, increased frequency of drawdowns, fewer trades, longer trades (swing trading), larger position sizes, use of leverage, and return volatility. My particular method of trading penny stocks, because I never hold very long and keep my position size small both in absolute terms and relative to my capital, means that my cost of equity is low relative to other trading strategies. I therefore set my annual cost of equity at 10% compounded. What I mean by this is that if I do not make my 10% in one year I feel the need to make up the difference the next year. Compared to an expected return of maybe 7% to 8% for a buy and hold portfolio of stocks (with large drawdowns) this seems reasonable. My trading strategy is much lower risk than the market portfolio. I can say this because so far this year I have not had a negative month. In fact, in 2010 I only had one negative month, when I lost $1579 in March 2010. Below are my monthly returns since 2010:

Monthly returns, January 2010 to August 2011
2010
1.91%
2.10%
-0.29%
4.29%
3.16%
0.74%
1.74%
0.94%
1.79%
1.10%
1.26%
1.56%
2011
4.19%
1.57%
2.49%
2.84%
2.52%
3.47%
1.89%
1.18%

For those of you with a basic understanding of computing compounded returns, you can calculate that my time-weighted IRR for 2011 is 21.98% so far. To calculate my return minus my imputed salary I simply subtract my monthly imputed salary $4167 ($50,000 / 12 months) from each month’s dollar return and then calculate and chain the new percent returns to get my time-weighted post-salary IRR. This is at 13.87% for the current year, so I have made an acceptable return so far. Obviously I aim to generate higher than just acceptable returns, but my goal as a full-time trader is not to generate the highest return possible but to generate good returns while minimizing my risk. Over the last two years I have done that quite well.

The problem of too much capital

I have a large amount of cash in my trading accounts. This obviously reduces my returns because I keep my position size tiny and I have not even come close to using all my capital in the last year or two. Most professional full-time day-traders that I know prefer to keep their trading accounts relatively small so as to minimize the urge to take overly large positions. Due to my personality I have no such urge so it does not harm me to keep extra money in my trading accounts. Because of this I can also avoid having a separate emergency fund–I know I always have plenty of cash in my trading accounts. Also, with bond yields so low over the last couple years there is little opportunity cost to keeping so much cash. That being said, my percent returns have been juiced the last few months by a large withdrawal I made from my trading accounts to buy a house with cash. While it may seem silly to pay cash when mortgages are at 4%, by paying cash I reduce my overall leverage and earn a guaranteed 4% return on money I wasn’t really using anyway.

For those with too little capital

The problem of too much capital is very far from most trader’s problem of having too little capital. I see so many people trading and spending lots of time trading, with $5,000 or smaller accounts. If that is all the money they have it seems foolish to spend a ton of time learning to trade if that requires them to neglect a day-job. While I have known some people who have built up such a small account, it is very hard to do. Now if someone starts trading with such a small sum of money but can increase his account size after he has learned to trade and become profitable, then that is a very smart thing to do. And if a trader can trade without impairing his job performance or by utilizing free time, then that is also fine. But I am sure that many people who try to trade with small amounts of capital would be better off putting the effort into improving their career prospects. It would be a poor tradeoff indeed to sacrifice the potential for large salary increases just to obtain a few thousand dollars in trading gains.

That being said, one benefit of having a small amount of capital is that a trader can take much more risk. For someone with a $50,000/year job and a $10,000 trading account, a 50% drawdown is not nearly as big a problem as it would be for me. That person can easily save enough money in a year to bring the account size back to where it was.

Technical details

I encourage reading of Investment Performance Measurement which is a great book on all the nitty-gritty details of exactly measuring performance and calculating different types of IRR.

For calculating my time-weighted IRR I simply do it by month using my monthly starting capital in all my accounts and then dividing my monthly return into that figure, chaining the resulting monthly percent returns. I withdraw money from my accounts over time so by not breaking my performance down into smaller time periods separated by each withdrawal my calculated performance ends up being slightly lower than my real performance. To reduce the data entry work this is an acceptable short cut. Somebody gradually adding money to his trading accounts would inflate his calculated performance by not properly accounting for the deposits to his trading accounts.

Those who add or subtract money from a trading portfolio that is not in substantially all cash should also compute their money-weighted IRR to determine if they are adding or subtracting value by changing how much money is in their account/portfolio.

One last note

My monthly performance numbers do not include non-commission broker costs or other costs. These should add up to a few thousand dollars this year.

Disclaimer: This blog has a terms of use that is incorporated by reference into this post; you can find all my disclaimers and disclosures there as well.

Silence in the library

My blogcation has now become an indefinite halt of regular blogging. Simply put, my blogging is not currently offering enough rewards (monetary and psychological) to compensate for the effort and hassle.  I will continue to post interesting links on Twitter (though rarely) and I will occasionally post new articles here. I am not disappearing completely from the internet; I will continue to be the administrator/moderator of Tim Sykes’ chatroom.

I will continue to upload most of my trades to Profit.ly, which I update weekly or bi-weekly (from the beginning on this blog I have said that I will not share my trades in my ‘super-secret’ trading strategy and I do not upload those trades to Profit.ly; excepting for that strategy and a new pseudo-arbitrage strategy I have been using since December, I upload all of my new trades).

If you comment on this post, you can save time and effort by simply posting the number of one of the three most likely categories of comments:

(1) I love you! Please don’t go!
(2) You owe me more free content! You are a jerk for not giving me what I want for free!
(3) You are stupid, ugly, and your trading sucks. The world will be a better place without you polluting the blogosphere. I think so little of you that I compulsively read your blog and feel compelled to comment on it.

Disclosure: I get paid for moderating Sykes’ chatroom based on how many people are in it during trading hours. This blog has a terms of use that is incorporated by reference into this post; you can find all my disclaimers and disclosures there as well.