Thursday, May 24, 2012

Facebook IPO a Bust or Wait Some More?

I wanted to get a thought in here before all the hype calms down on this. I never even thought of wanting to get in on this IPO. I've had enough experience in IPO's decades ago with many brokers chumming me with them and then only to talk me into selling right after and buy some other worthless hyped stock of the day they were pushing. After all, brokers are a business and they have their agents to sell their products to you so they can make money. See, everything today is about business and making money. But, you don't want to be a schmuch with egg on your face, who does. This IPO was too over hyped in my opinion. I believe if the price falls down to around $8 to $10 a share then the common man might want to buy up a hundred shares or two and put them away for awhile. I mean, you do have a Scottrade account don't you? Only $7 a trade and I don't see anywhere cheaper than that. Do you do 'limit orders' when you trade? If not you are missing out and possibly losing money too. With Scottrade they offer for $10 a month, Level II stock monitoring and trading. What the heck is Level II you ask? It's the real-time stuff, not fifteen minutes delayed stock prices like you see on the tv and you get on your smartphone apps and all over the web. It's a premium feature. Scottrade is now offering this to you for only $10 a month. I remember when they just started offering it as a beta product and I used if for over a year or more, then, got out of trading for a couple of years. Now, they've got all the bugs worked out and they can offer it for a fee. I recommend you try it out. The best part is being able to see the buy and sell side by side as the different exchanges show their offers in a little window of whatever stock you want to watch. It's right up the second and to the penny. I put in a trade for a 100 shares of Harley Davidson I had been holding onto for a few years. When I bought it the stock just started dropping. Such is my luck most times with stock it seems. Well, a couple of weeks ago I noticed it had climbed above my purchase price. I thought, I better get going and see if I can dump this and make a little profit when I do. Sure enough, I saw the offers at $48.28 a share. Blocks of a 100, 200, 300 shares were stacking up to trade. The buy side was taunting the sellers, inching up a penney at a time when the sellers pushed their price up. This told me the stock was going up but it was slow trading that morning and I knew it was just a matter of time before the stock will start to slump again. I better hurry I thought. So, I put in an order to trade a 100 shares at $48.29 with a limit order to sell all or none for the day. Then, I sat back and watched the little window. About two minutes later the I could see trades taking effect as the price punched through the $48.29 level. I knew I had made a sale so I check the status of my trade. Bingo! I had made $100 minus the $7 trade fee for the day. I was happy. After the market closed for the day I decided to go in a look at what Harley (HOG) leveled out at. It had dropped below $47 a share. I felt a good feeling of satisfaction. Now, if I wanted to take some more time and I felt this stock was being played by the masses, I'd go in the next day and put in another limit order to buy another 100 or 200 shares and see if I could clip off another $100 or $200 dollars. I didn't though, I'm not a day trader. I still work a full time job and I just don't have the time to sit around on the computer and watch the market, not even for an hour. When I retire, then, I'll maybe put more time into this. That is, if I'm not making it rich on marketing here on the web or rental properties.

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