Charts and tables

Ho hum.  Another week of obscene profits on Wall St.  I blame the Obama administration, with its Quantitative Easing and its calm, behind-the-scenes action regarding the Egyptian crisis.

The nice thing about this chart is that it creates the appearance that I know what I’m doing!  The green bars show that I have recovered my loss and now have more money than at the start of the year.  But the red line shows that I still would have been better off just parking my money in SPY.

Symbol	│	Fri		│	Mon		│	Tue		│	Wed		│	Thu		│	Fri		│	Actual
DRETF	│	8		│	6		│	6		│	6		│	5		│	5		│
SE	│	13	5	│	16	4	│	14	5	│	1		│	-3		│	0		│	5
FLIR	│	61	38	│	50	31	│	58	29	│	55	32	│	48		│	40		│	6!
ETN	│	23	1	│	12	-26	│	39	-14	│	29	-4	│	39	3	│	40	8	│
GIII	│	-58	-101	│	-26	-80	│	-19	-54	│	3	-44	│	21	-30	│	7	-23	│
ATML	│	-10	-55	│	-53	-121	│	-41	-78	│	126	-50	│	107	-38	│	96	0	│
MKL	│	-8	-44	│	11	-51	│	15	-31	│	15	-18	│	11	-10	│	18	-4	│
CAT	│			│	20	-60	│	19	-35	│	-1	-20	│	12	-17	│	53	-14	│
CVX	│			│			│	-11	-56	│	-47		│	-28		│	-28		│	-56
SPY	│			│			│	1	-38	│	-5	-31	│	-3	-20	│	7	-14	│
TNA	│			│			│			│	-62	-163	│	-14	-104	│	55	-70	│

In the table below, each day has two ‱ figures, for that day’s closing price and the next day’s stop.  Grey is for prices I didn’t get because the stock was sold.  DRETF doesn’t have stop prices.  As you run your eye along each row, note how the two numbers both increase and also get closer together.

SE: The new pSAR rule said I should have sold last Friday for 7‱.  I ended up selling on Wednesday for 5‱, which is the same amount of money spread over more days.

FLIR: What a disappointment!  Wednesday night the company reported its Q4 results.  They had missed analysts' estimated earnings by a penny.  Also they will start paying dividends, first payment later this month.  Sounds like not-bad news, right?  Wrong!  At Thursday's opening, FLIR gapped down 6%, triggering my stop.  The stock was in free-fall and no buyers were available at my stop price, so the stock-exchange computer sold my holdings for 26‱ less than my stop!  Then FLIR recovered later in the day.  There was no way I would have given FLIR a 6% stop depth, so there was no way I could have avoided getting thrown off that horse.  These things just happen sometimes, especially to companies that sell pornoscanner equipment to the US government.

ATML: On Wednesday Atmel announced its Q1 earnings guidance, which blew analysts' estimates out of the water.  Its stock rose 15% that day.  This is one of those lucky breaks where you just have to be holding the stock when the good news happens.  What a nice way to counteract the sting of FLIR!

CVX: Got thrown off another horse.  Ouch!

 

In this week’s version of the pie chart, you can hover your mouse over each pie slice to see the name of the company; click on a slice to see a price chart.  This kind of HTML construction is called a "client-side image map".  I very rarely find any use for them.  They are a bit of work to construct, so I am not promising to do this again next week.

Remarkably upbeat weather forecast

"I'll be bold and predict that today is going to be the coldest day we see until the fall."

(link)