Category Archives: Themes

The lens through which you have experienced the world is also the lens through which you ultimately view the world. Thus a person who spent decades in marketing could argue that almost everything is a subset of marketing. But sometimes it becomes a bit of a reach. Last year I read Ken Auletta’s Frenemies book […]

I think most penny stocks are penny stocks for a reason – either they are failed businesses, scams, or have some other reason they remain publicly traded while having little to no economic value (based on their market price). In some cases regulatory changes can cause formerly broken businesses to become once again viable. That […]

Last year’s sell off was relentless. Even trades that had long bases & were overly obvious still cratered with the broader market. No matter what you were in, if you were in almost anything (other than a short position) you were virtually guaranteed to lose as asset prices deflated. Amazon.com announced they were nixing their […]

January was the best opening month for the stock market since 1987. I doubt we will see a repeat of Black Monday with the DJIA off 22.6% in a day, but there are still many potential negative catalysts in the market: debt build up, slowing growth globally, growing political populism & nationalism, trade imbalances across Europe creating […]

TGT stock trades around where it was in July of 2007. In the decade plus since many specialty retailers have went under, been bought out by private equity, or have been bought out by private equity then went under. Every time a company like Toys R Us disappears it ultimately increases the value of Walmart, Target […]

Pets Are Great Late last week I traded PETS twice in a single day. Caught just about the bottom penny and then sold it for about a 1% gain. Both rather small positions, but gained about a percent on each transaction. Yesterday I bought PETS once again, but got a crappy fill on the position as the […]

Funko was up over 4% today. I sold off 40% of the shares of Funko I was holding. I also sold Exxon Mobil at open for a nice gain. I bought some more XOM again around $77 & just sold it off again at about $77.40. If it goes under $77 I wouldn’t mind buying a […]

One big issue with mean reversion trades is when the range breaks it can break HARD & FAST.  If you use tons of leverage on mean reversion you can get hit hard when the range breaks. A couple of my favorite mean reverting / rangebound stocks over the past few months were Funko & AT&T. […]