Today was a really bad day for me, I didn’t do any trades, at all, mainly because all my money was invested in stocks that lost money today. I try my best no to sell on a loss.

One of the worst performing stocks in my portfolio is BAC, which is on a losing streak for a week now. I have lost so much money on this stock right now it’s not even funny. The stock will hopefully rebound, it’s just a question of time, but the problem is that the money invested in this stock is locked. I hope tomorrow BAC will come up with some good news. I should have bought BAC at a cheaper price, but now I know…

On the bright side, I am now an Active Trader, which means that I can do trades for way less commission fee than before, which will make my profit margin higher. The problem is that today I saw a lot of opportunities, but my money is already locked in some stocks that underperformed.

Moving forward, I will split my portfolio into cash and equities evenly, I will use the cash to buy equities that will most likely rebound in a very short period (I’m talking an hour or two here) and sell them as they rebound. The equities part will be used to buy high ris stocks that were beaten to near death, and I will wait for them to go up (usually this happens in a week or two). An example of these stocks is BIOS, NVIDIA, etc…

I can’t wait for my stocks to go up…

I’m sure everyone heard about Michael Hurd, who was the subject of a scandal involving a contractor, Jodie Fisher, who was also an actress.

Both insist that nothing happened, yet she got money off of him, he got fired (but he did get a good severance package) for breaking the company work of ethics. Hmmmm! Bottom line is that the stock shed 8% of its value.

I am wondering about 2 things:

– What happened? Did they do it or not? If they both keep on claiming that nothing happened, so what is the fuss about? Why did he lose his job over this? I’m sure HP won’t fire employees for watching one of Jodie’s R rated movies.
– Will HP suffer the same fate as Apple when the latter fired Steve Jobs? Apparently, some people think it will! To be honest, I think HP sucked before Hurd was the CEO, and it will suck again after he leaves. Dell, Toshiba, and Sony must be laughing right now.

I think that the stock has not gone through the full correction yet, and there will be an entry point at around $40.

A couple of weeks ago, BIOS was down over 30% on high volume, and the stock reached a low of 4.12 last week. But then, something happened, and the stock started to go up on Thursday and Friday, and closed at around 4.54. So why did the stock go down, and why did it go up?

2 weeks ago the company released their earnings for the second quarter, and BIOS missed the estimates, their guidance wasn’t that great either. The stock was slaughtered. But after the stock reached 4.31 the following week, some interesting things started happening: The January 2011 $5 Puts were sold, which means that the investors believed, at this point, that the stock has bottomed. Nevertheless, panic still reigned and people still were selling, and the stock reached a bottom of 4.12. But then more interesting things started happening. Thursday the stock reversed the trend and started going up, and Friday the stock went up 7% on 2.5 times the average volume, which is very bullish as it marks the reverse of the earlier (down) trend. The stock went up because apparently senior executives at BIOS started buying more shares in their own company, which means that insiders think that the stock is largely undervalued, and do not share the analysts opinion about the future of the company. After all, the stock is now trading below its book value of 4.90, which makes BIOS a bargain in the case of a takeover bid.

Let’s see what next week will reveal about this stock, and if the stock will break the $5 mark. BIOS is a reputable company with a bright long term future, and again any stock is a bargain if traded below the book value while the company is still making profits.

I bought some AAPL shares at around $247 a couple of weeks ago when the antennagate was a hot issue and adversely affecting the AAPL stock. Then Steve Jobs held a conference, and started talking about “this scandal” (he even mentioned the Bloomberg rumor and called it a crock). He demonstrated that the problem was not only in the iphone 4, but in all other smartphones when held in certain ways. I don’t think that was a wise thing to do, because other smartphones will obviously retaliate (and they did).

Another unwise thing was mentioning investors worrying when the stock goes down or up $5, saying that “he doesn’t need them”. Well, guess what, these are the majority of investors. Capital is a chicken, it will run away with the slightest sign of danger.

Anyway, Steve Jobs offered a bugs bunny fix (free bumper/cover or whatever for the iphone) to fix the problem. The market breathed again and the stock went up $4, and then went down another $4, within minutes. Why did that happen? Clearly it was something that Steve Jobs said. I don’t know what it was, but I didn’t like his attitude towards the investors, and he wasn’t also guaranteeing a fix. Obviously the problem is with the design, and there might be also a software problem with the calculation of the reception bars.

Anyway, my opinion about this whole antennagate story is that it’s nothing, I have a Nokia phone and if I hold it differently I have different reception, why should the iphone be any different? Or better? Why should it be judged by higher standards? The story was there so that some people who shorted the stock at around $280 would make some serious cash.

But there is something that scares me about AAPL, when I saw the press conference that Steve Jobs did on youtube, I saw how weak, physically weak he was. See I think what made the stock drop back (the $4 swing) was the question about his health, someone asked him, “how is your health”, his answer was that it was good.

The problem with Apple is that the whole vision of the company is centered in one person, at least this is what the market believes (remember the last few months of 2008 when the stock went to down almost 50% on his health concerns?). Bloomberg even published an obituary for Steve Jobs (Bloomberg people really hate Apple btw, or they were just playing with the stock). There are many rumors stating that Steve Jobs is involved in every process of every product design.

Apple is always a buy, but as long as Steve Jobs is alive and healthy, but if he dies, the stock will sharply decline, probably forever. And if he gets sick, the stock will drop for months (the last time it was about 6 months). My manager once told me, a company where not everyone is replaceable is not a company. Is Steve Jobs replaceable? Is Apple a company?

For the last few days I’ve been reading a lot about RIMM to know where this stock is going. Apparently, this stock is very uncertain. In my opinion, sell now while you either make some money or lose just a bit. The stock is a buy under $50, but only for a short trade. Here are my reasons why RIMM should be avoided (on the long run):

RIMM is already losing market share to the Android phones (MOT, HTC, etc…) and AAPL. These products are actually eating RIMM’s market share in the smartphone area, but not from each other. You can also see that people are losing interest in the blackberry, take a look at this chart, representing the number of visits to the blackberry website:

Notice that the number of visits to the blackberry website is on the downside. People are slowly losing interest in this product. On the other hand, on the Google Keywords website, the search for the term “blackberry” is clearly showing some slight increase over the last few months (December is always an exception when it comes to technology).

The standoff between RIM and some Middle Eastern as well as other very important countries such as India is not a good sign. RIM wasn’t proactive at all in managing these conflicts, instead, they dragged and thought that with time, people will forget. Apparently the UAE called upon RIM to rectify the situation almost 2 years ago, but RIM, with its infinite wisdom, ignored them. The UAE is a heavy weight country in the Middle East, and even ASIA. I have no idea why they didn’t accommodate their needs, instead, they were giving lame excuses such as they don’t have access to the encryption code of the users. I’ve been a programmer since probably the age of 11, and I know that there is no way RIM can’t have access to the users’ information that is stored on their servers. If you want to do business outside, you have to cede to the local laws, whether you like it or not. Google did the same stupid mistake with China, and now they lost the Chinese market to BIDU, a stock that has increased 110% so far this year, while GOOG is down 20% this year. I’m amazed why some companies forget that they’re there to make money for their investors, and not try to enforce their political agendas. Going back to RIM, apparently they finally ceded to Saudi Arabia and said that they will host the servers serving the KSA in the Kingdom. Hmmm…. What does that mean? I guess it means more expenses and less value in the stock. And these are not just one time expenses, RIM has to have employees, has to maintain the KSA servers, etc… I don’t know how much the costs will be, but there will be costs. The same probably will be done for the UAE, and many other MENA countries, not to mention, of course heavyweight telecom markets such as India. I wonder what their overhead in India will be for doing the same thing.

Now after we have examined the politics surrounding the company, let’s examine the product. The blackberry is now ugly, whatever they’ll do to it, it’ll still be ugly. This small keyboard. Ugghhh! It’s also unintuitive, especially for older people. The iphone, on the other hand, is probably the most intuitive and beautiful thing on this earth (and that’s not me talking, that’s probably every tech magazine on the web). The blackberry torch, apparently, is an iphone 4 copycat. RIM who were once innovators and leaders, are now mere followers. Who knows, maybe they’ll become like Microsoft when they first copied Apple, but I doubt it…

There are major risks involved in this company, one of them is the data integrity and security. What if their servers are breached? What will happen to the stock? How will people react? Will they still keep their berries?

Finally take a look at the stock technical analysis here.

Again, I would buy the stock under $50, and sell for the small rebound, but forget RIMM as a long term investment for your kids…