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[Investing 101] – How to Pick a Winning Stock 100% of the Time

13 Wednesday Apr 2016

Posted by Sudarshan Sridharan in Investing 101

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First of all, I’ve gotten quite a bit of feedback since I started writing the blog again. Due to the feedback received I will be writing about Virtual Reality Stocks, Under Armour and Michael Kors, and expediting the Investing for Beginners series. This article was going to be apart of one MASSIVE Investing for Beginners article, but I’ve decided to make it a series. I will be adding to these as I go, and then at the end of the series, I will be compiling all the articles into one big, edited, article.

I know I’ve gotten behind on the 30 articles in 30 days, but I’m really trying to get back on track with these articles, and with school work, so it’s been a bit of a grind.

I know that this article is totally out of place in the series and should be like the 3rd or 4th article in the series, but honestly, I’m not really feeling like explaining the primitive basics of how the stock market works right now (midnight), so enjoy this article.


As I’ve said before, I’m more of a, “Use your heart not your head” type of investor. That philosophy takes on different styles of investing every time, but for this article I will be sticking to one specific style.

The stock market isn’t something that you have to study for years and have a natural talent for, it’s just like a game – play it long enough and you’ll learn everything about it, and become extremely skilled at it.

All you do is look for stuff you use in your everyday life. Then you ask yourself a couple questions, and then you decide whether or not you want to buy the stock by asking yourself a few more questions. It might seem really dumbed down and simple, but that’s because it is.

This is one of the easiest ways to find a stock that you know you will not lose money in (as long as you don’t invest in Financials like banks, or Healthcare stocks, you should be fine). Why? Because these companies are NECESSARY for the world to go on. Chances are, if you use something, and your friends use something, then the majority of everybody uses it.

This is how  found stocks like Netflix, Tesla (although it wasn’t necessary or mandatory at the time when I found the stock in 2012), Amazon, Adobe, Microsoft, Apple, Google, FaceBook, Visa, Nike, Under Armour, Activision, Electronic Arts, and a lot, lot more.

If you’re reading this and going, wait, all this kid did was spit out FAANG (Jim Cramer’s acronym for the super successful tech stocks that are holding the Nasdaq up), and a few other stocks that are super obvious, well you’re right. Except, I found every stock in FAANG 3 years before Cramer (Netflix being the last of the stocks that I identified in 2012). How? Well I just asked myself these questions:

  • What do I use everyday?
  • Do other people use it everyday?
  • Can the world function without it?
  • Will people feel a void if it doesn’t exist?
  • Do all my friends and family use it or want it?
  • Will it impact them if it disappears?
    • If yes to all the questions above, proceed to find the items creator and check if they have a stock.
    • If they have a stock, ask yourself these questions:
      • Have the recently announced earnings?
      • Have they shot up a lot recently(50% or more in the last quarter is how I define it, you’ll come up with your own definition as you learn)?
      • Are they expected to do poorly in earnings?
    • If the answer to any of the above is yes then I don’t recommend buying the stock. The only times I’ve broken these rules and still made money is with Netflix every January when they report earnings and have over inflated comps which analysts never expect and the stock shoots up (check out my post from Jan. 2014 when the stock went up 86% the week I recommended buying it), and with every other stock in FAANG, as well as a few other trades. However, seeing that this is [Investing 101], I’m going to assume that you don’t have enough experience to make that kind of call yet.

Now that you’ve asked yourself all these questions, I recommend blindly going to your brokerage of choice and putting in an order to take a ~5% or less stake in the company.

When I was 11 (I think this may have been before I turned 11), in 2011, I made a list of 3 companies the world couldn’t go on without. The list was:

  • Adobe
  • Microsoft
  • Google

Are you surprised to see Microsoft and Adobe on that list? Well now I’d probably replace Microsoft with FaceBook, and keep the rest of the list the same. Either ways MSFT has done spectacularly in the last 5 years, as has ADBE, and GOOG/GOOGL. Amazon (AMZN) was a strong contended for the Microsoft slot until Jet.com came out. Now you have Ali-Baba spin offs, and Jet.com to cover just about all of your online shopping needs. While no one under 35 uses FaceBook anymore for purely social media purposes, it’s used by just about every business, hosts a plethora of games, and is leading the way in virtual reality development (and in about 50 [sic] other fields as well).

Anyways, the reasoning behind Adobe was that everyone used PDFs. Gamers everywhere used Flash, and Youtube is based on Adobe Flash. Imagine if Adobe went under, the few months (at least weeks), you’d be without Youtube would be devastating for people everywhere.

The reasoning behind Google was (and still is) that it is used by everyone, for just about everything on the internet. Teachers say, “Google it,” not, “Bing it,” or, “Yahoo it,” (Yahoo, right that still exists), entire businesses are built off of Youtube, manipulating Google Search Engine Results, Google Blogs, AdSense, Scholar, Wallet, Play, Android, literally everything that is anything, Google was involved somewhere along the way.

Now if you’re in a betting mood, you can take a chance on companies that have fallen on hard times. I recommended a company called Aeropostale on Quora a few weeks ago. ARO had fallen from $30 to $0.20 cents. I figured that I saw enough Aeropostale shirts floating around school that it was still relevant, and that it couldn’t possibly just go under like that (and even if it did, oh no, you just lost $0.20 a share). I went to school and asked 10 girls when the last time they wore Aeropostale was.

I was surprised by the number of people who’d worn it within the last week (7), so I figured YOLO, lets go for it. On April 4, the stock rallied to above 50%.

I’d give some more anecdotal evidence about why these simple questions are so good at getting the job done, but you won’t believe it until you see it for yourself. Go ahead, track a stock for a couple weeks (or months), that you picked using this method and report back with the results.

I don’t recommend using this for banks, healthcare stocks, or social media stocks because they are so fragile and move due to far too many other reasons. Social Media stocks are incredibly hard to make money off of because most social networks don’t have proper advertising and revenue structures in place.

I try to respond to every email I get, but there are an awful lot of them, and only one of me, so give me a few days and I’ll get around to you. I hope this article was helpful in some way, and if it was, please rate it and leave a comment.

I’d write some more, but it’s almost 2 am here, and even if I did go to bed at 9pm last night, I’m feeling tired, so good night, and hope this helped!

 

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The 30 for 30: The Primepick Renaissance

06 Wednesday Apr 2016

Posted by Sudarshan Sridharan in General, Market News, News, Stock News

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

AAPL, AMZN, daily, GOOG, Invest, Investing, Investment, life, money, NFLX, pick, prodigy, quora, real estate, Stock, Stocks, Ticker, Trader, TSLA


Skip to the bottom if you want to know who I am exactly and what credentials I have. This part is explaining the direction of the Primepick, and what I’m going to be doing with the blog. You should read it too.

Alright so for those of you that don’t know, I started the PrimePick when I was 13 years old. Every single stock I’ve ever written about on here (yes ever) has gone on to be profitable – at least for that recommended time frame.

I have been very active on Quora.com recently (it’s a great website, seriously check it out), and was repeatedly asked to write about my stock picks and stock advice, as well as business, consulting, and marketing advice. It started getting to the point where on every single one of my finance posts one or two people would ask me to write somewhere.

I didn’t realize that I would ever be this in demand (because after well over 2 years, this site hasn’t broken a 1000 views), but now I think it’s time that I started writing about my investments again.

EROS went up to $13, when I recommended it at $6 in January (that was my last post, and I onl wrote it because I was trying SUPER hard to get back into this and failed miserably). On Quora, I recommended ARO (Aeropostale), days before it exploded 50% to go as high as $0.39, from when I called it at $0.2. People were calling me “unqualified” and telling me that I didn’t know what I was talking about because I was only 15.

They never came back to that post (because who really wants to talk to an unqualified 15 year old right?), but that was it. I got like 15 people who saw that messaging me that I absolutely had to write, so that’s what I decided to do.

One of the guys on that post reminded me that I had called Netflix in Jan. 2014 before it ran up 86% THAT WEEK! After reading that I realized this could be my resume for my first job, or something that I show to future investors interested in giving me their money.

I will be writing 30 posts in 30 days (or less) about running a business, investing, consulting, marketing, basically anything finance related that you can think of, I’ll write about it.

It’s going to be hard, but I’ll do it. After that, I’m going to write 2-4 posts  a week, and keep you guys updated every time I am going to buy a stock.


 

My name is Sudarshan Sridharan and I’m 15 years old. Last year I made 24% on the stock market, and I have never made a trade for a loss in my life. This year I started a business in January, then after that started running itself (because of good management from people who weren’t me), I started a website design and app creation company. I am extremely business minded and I plan on LLC’ing both companies under an umbrella company sometime in June of this year before I turn 16.

I have been into stocks since I was 7 and a half years old, and I have been investing with real money since I was 11. I turned my Google Finance Play Money Portfolio into my first pitch deck when I asked my dad for real money to invest with.

I don’t use math to justify my trades. Stocks like ARO (read above if you don’t know what I’m talking about) just don’t cut it at a fundamental level, but using my methods and intuition (yeah, my gut feeling), I can find and invest in stocks people don’t expect to ever turn a profit on again. I also invest in high flying tech stocks (although all my normal ones like AAPL, GOOG, NFLX, TSLA, ADBE, FB, all seem washed up. AMZN is probably the only one that I can depend on to make me like ten bucks a share in a day), and extremely risky stocks that could either go sky high, or crash.

My least favorite trades are the ones I always find myself stuck in for months (like the ones I’m in right now with NKE and V), but companies like those, with little to no downside and high upside are the ones I tend to go into after I’ve made a lot of money and want to cool down.

Anyways, I understand that you may have trouble accepting advice from a 15 year old who doesn’t use math to justify any trades, but I do have a very strong and established track record, a strong demand (which I hope translates into views on here), as well as a strong set of principles that I invest off of and follow religiously. I’ll write about them on here one day.

If you ever need something answered on here, just message me using the Contact Us page and I’ll write about it.

Thanks for reading, here’s to a new beginning and a lot of money.

Follow Me on Quora: https://www.quora.com/profile/Sudarshan-Sridharan-4

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China’s Down More than 25% in the Last Month, Is it a Good Time to Actually Bet ON China? Exploring the YINN

10 Friday Jul 2015

Posted by Sudarshan Sridharan in News

≈ Leave a comment

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and, buffet, China, Finance, make, making, money, Primepick, Stocks, warren, warren buffet, Wordpress, yang, yin, yin and yang, yinn


Much like the Yin and Yang that represent good and evil in Chinese mythology, their financial counterparts represent how China as a whole is doing. For those of you who do not know, the YINN (Direxion Daily China Bear 3x Shares ETF) bets on China. For every one percent China goes up, you make three times that much money. The YANG (Direxion Daily China Bull 3x Shares ETF) does the opposite, it bets against the Chinese market, and every time it goes down 1 percent, the stock goes up three times. Over the past 30 days, China has fallen more than 25%. This chart of the SSE Composite Index (an index of all stocks traded in the Shanghai Stock Exchange) from Yahoo Finance clearly shows the decline in Chinese Markets from its peak on June 5.

Screen Shot 2015-07-10 at 11.25.21 AM

The red line is the S&P500s performance over the same time period of 3 months.

So what does this mean for YINN and YANG? Well, YANG has fallen from over $2500 in 2011 to a little less than $80 right now. It’s a big mover in the way that it has potential to make $15 in a day, and fall $20 the next, but its entire stock price revolves around the Chinese Market doing poorly, and that’s a terrible bet to make; especially since China has been one of the fastest growing markets in the world for the past decade. Right now YINN is in an incredible position: its fallen from over $65 in April, to $30 this month. It’s a steal.

Why?

Let’s take a look back in history when the Oracle of Omaha – Warren Buffet – bought thousands of shares of CocaCola (Ticker: KO) after its stock was decimated by health concerns and factory malfunctions. His philosophy was simple:

The best thing that happens to us is when a great company gets into temporary trouble…We want to buy them when they’re on the operating table.

Like that, we want to buy excellent stocks at extremely low prices and sell at an incredibly high rate. In essence, buy low sell high. China will recover, it has to. China isn’t undergoing a recession, it’s undergoing a market correction. As soon as China picks itself up, YINN will pick up too. It’s a stock betting bull on one of the best markets in the world, and it’s a steal.

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A Strong Case for Netflix (Ticker: NFLX)

22 Wednesday Jan 2014

Posted by Sudarshan Sridharan in News

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

AAPL, Apple, earnings, Investing, Investment, money, Netflix, NFLX, Profit, quarter, quarterly earnings, Quarterly Earnings Report, Report, Stock, Stocks, Ticker, Tickers


So I bought Netflix yesterday at 3:52 pm, rushing to sell all my BAC and TSLA stocks to put 90% of my money into NFLX. I’ve written EXTENSIVELY (even when I wasn’t holding Netflix shares) about why it’s such a solid trade. I’ve just finished this study I was working on, and I learned something else from the study, Netflix and Apple are slated to go up so much, that it’s going to blow your mind (Well I think it should be obvious to all of you reading this that both stocks are going to skyrocket after their quarterly earnings reports).

The Facts:

Out of the Last 8 quarterly reports, Netflix has reported a Quartlery Loss twice! The first time I bought Netflix, was at, $88 and osme odd ccents. This was after the stock completely tanked from $300+ to $55. I’m a strong believer in, “The Market will bring back stocks that are vital to the American Household,” and guess what, Netflix is vital to every binge watcher who’s seen House of Cards, to the 6 year old kid who watches Netflix every day after school.

After I bought Netflix, it reported its first quarterly Profit in some 6 quarters. Overnight my shares almost doubled, and it didn’t let up the next day, or day after. The same thing happened (but to a lesser extent) the next time Netflix reported a quarterly earnings, and it has continued for four quarters after that. Oh and guess What? Netflix is Reporting Quarterly Earnings TODAY! That’s why I was scrambling to buy it yesterday at 3:52 pm after maximizing my profits on TSLA and BAC.

https://www.google.com/finance?q=nflx&ei=8dzfUujoM4GJsgez0wE

As you can see from the chart above, Netflix has had PHENOMENAL growth over the last 12 months.

The Problem

Netflix not only depends on this Quarterly Earnings Report to keep its drive alive, it also depends on the Report to make a $12 billion deal with 21st Century Fox. The fact that Netflix has rebounded from the $250.00 drop back to its former glory in just 12 months is also astounding. However, if Netflix doesn’t report a profit, it won’t break the $400.00 threshold, and if it doesn’t break the $400.00 threshold soon, it’s doomed to go back down, even if it doesn’t go to astronomical lows like last time.

The Bottom Line:

Well I trusted enough in Netflix to pull through (as it has for the last 6 quarters, and with the release of hit shows like Orange is the New Black and House of Cards to bring the company back to its former glory.

EDIT: The chart isn’t working so I have attached a link in it’s place. Sorry.

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So is Yahoo really back on top? Let’s find out….(Yes it is and here’s why)

14 Tuesday Jan 2014

Posted by Sudarshan Sridharan in News

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Chart, Charts, Death Cross, Golden Cross, Google, Google Finance, Hedgefund, Investing, Investor, Investors, Marissa Mayer, Mayer, money, Stock, Stocks, Tesla, Ticker, TSLA, Tumblr, Wordpress, Yahoo, YHOO


Well first of all WordPress has been having problems including a “Hack-Attack” by the group Anonymous who seized the data of anyone who logged into or viewed WordPress Blogs/Sites after Christmas. This was limited to a few sites, but I just had to make sure. Google rates WP and the Prime Pick with a safe rating again so everything is good now!

Alright so about Yahoo, it’s a big article, so take your time and enjoy…..!

ImageSo this is Yahoo’s (Ticker:YHOO) 1 Year chart since Marissa Mayer took over. Just look at that increase. So what happened? Well first of all I read on  either Seeking Alpha or ValueWalk that some scientists had found out that stocks of company’s with attractive male or female CEO’s saw close to a double in stock price within the first year of the CEO joining. Well I really wouldn’t accredit Yahoo’s amazing success to Marissa Mayer’s looks since she’s only appeared on one issue of Vanity Fair. Rather I would say that she joined a company that is re-entering phase 2 (at least for its stock). Phase 1 was rehabilitation. Image 1.2 (below) will show you the 5 year chart, and that the company was already starting to stabilize and just needed a push.

Image

Mayer saw how the very top of Google attacked it’s business plan and how it stuck to it ’till the end. Having been about as close to the top job as possible, Mayer helped plan and buy companies that would eventually make Google billions of dollars in revenue. She simply took this abundant knowledge and restructured Yahoo. From personal experience I can tell you Yahoo was already starting to attract younger users and appealed to a wide variety of people. Mayer set in place a very structured FIVE YEAR business plan and started to work Yahoo back into users’ minds. Under Mayer, Yahoo but Tumblr, then other social media sites, bringing their advertising and money making plans to close to a billion users worldwide. 

Yahoo is currently in phase two of it’s stock trend. Phase two is when the stock starts to go upward and starts to go up at a ridiculous pace. This can last for a few month, or even a few years (think Apple, possibly Netflix.)! So this is the time to buy, am I telling you this after Yahoo is gone up over 300%? Yes I am and I’m sorry, but $15.15 to $41.14 isn’t exactly game breaking for a stock that’s going to go up to heights of Google (I can only hope. I correctly predicted to a “T” the month that Apple would fall from its staggering $700.00 stock price. This was because Apple did EXACTLY what it said it would. I am only scared that Yahoo won’t stick to the business plan that it has promised, which would then lose millions billions of dollars for the company. Of course, Google broke its business plan and made a $800 run and is still growing, but Yahoo can’t do that reasonably). 

Last month (December) Yahoo surpassed Google in web searches! That, according to my research, hasn’t been done in almost 6 years! Yahoo is DEFINITELY growing, and I hope that the facts that I have given you (few but true and major) will help you in deciding when to get into Yahoo. I made money on Twitter somehow, despite being a staunch believer that market hype will not make a company that is $-246 million dollars in the hole a profit. I was wrong in that case, but Yahoo has not only Market Hype, but also actual money and revenue coming in from SO MANY sources! And another plus is that it doesn’t (According to its press release 3 months ago), sell your email to 3rd party spammers! 

I’d place a buy order at $40.51 for Yahoo (that should be the safest place for Yahoo to buy), a sell order at $35.29 (the reasoning behind this is that Yahoo does have a chance of falling big before recovering, like Tesla, Netflix, or Apple. In order to prevent massive losses, $38.40 is the widely accepted number, but I disagree because Yahoo has fallen up to eight dollars in a day before recovering to end days in massive gains! That is the lowest it has fallen, so I say six dollars from it’s current price, would be reasonable), and then I’d buy some shares of Yahoo tomorrow at 10:01 am (That is a very calculated time, I’m not even joking.). 

Bottom Line: Yahoo is a slowly growing company that is 1 year into it’s 4 year growth stretch (look at 200 day moving average) and I’d say if you don’t buy it now within the next month, you’d easily be losing $50 – $60 dollars!

UPDATE:

I was examining Yahoo’s charts closely, and I just realized something: A death cross or a Golden Cross occurs every other time the crosses happen. It also happens about every 4 years. By that standards, Yahoo is due for a death cross between 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 years from now because a golden cross has just happened. It may not seem like much, but the price is highest right before the cross occurs! This means that the next time the Cross occurs, if Marissa Mayer’s is able to avert a Death Cross, then we can safely guarantee that Yahoo has entered its second “Golden Age” and then I’d recommend dumping all your money into Yahoo. I’m a day trader, not a long term trader, but for you long term traders, I would buy Yahoo now while it’s super low!

Image Hope I have been able to help at least a little! Enjoy, and invest on!

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Ireland refunds EU’s Bail – Regains their Irish Pride

16 Monday Dec 2013

Posted by Sudarshan Sridharan in News

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Tags

Bail, Bail Money, EU, European, European Union, Finance, Ireland, Irish, money, Stock, Stocks, Union


Well the Irish were smarter than most other countries when they set up their Austerity program. Rather than letting Austerity kill the dying beast, the Irish were able to set up the Austerity so that it was very lenient on them, and helped them grow TREMENDOUSLY. Although Ireland didn’t need much bail-out money, many countries that got it aren’t on track to pay it back for 30 years! Well good job to the Irish, and the Irish President, Michael D. Higgins, stated that unemployment would be at 1.2% in his country by the end of his term!

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The Volcker Rule

12 Thursday Dec 2013

Posted by Sudarshan Sridharan in News

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Finance, Investing, Investor, Investors, Rule, Stock, Stocks, The Volcker Rule, Trader, Traders, Trading, Volcker, Volcker Rule


Well we all know that America’s international competitors have the clear cut upper hand advantage on American companies for at least the next 10-14 years. Other than that, have you ever actually bothered to learn what’s in the almost 900 page document? An article from NYT explains it clearly and Perfectly. WARNING: You should settle down for a couple of minutes and sit back in your chair if your going to read this, it’s MASSIVE.

When Paul Volcker called for new rules in 2009 to curb risk-taking by banks, and thus avoid making taxpayers liable in the future for the kind of reckless speculation that caused the financial crisis and resulting bailout, he outlined his proposal in a three-page letter to the president.

Last year, when the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act went to Congress, the Volcker Rule that it contained took up 10 pages.

Last week, when the proposed regulations for the Volcker Rule finally emerged for public comment, the text had swelled to 298 pages and was accompanied by more than 1,300 questions about 400 topics.

Wall Street firms have spent countless millions of dollars trying to water down the original Volcker proposal and have succeeded in inserting numerous exemptions. Now they’re claiming it’s too complex to understand and too costly to adopt.

Having read at least some of the proposed regulations — I made it through about five pages before sinking in a sea of acronyms — I can assure you that the banks are right about that. Even the helpful summary prepared by Sullivan & Cromwell, a law firm that represents big banks and that has associates who no doubt wrote the summary over several all-nighters, runs a dense 41 pages.

In numerous interviews this week with people across the political spectrum, I couldn’t find anyone who actually supports this behemoth — including Mr. Volcker, whose name it bears.

“I don’t like it, but there it is,” Mr. Volcker told me in his first public comments on the sprawling proposal.

“I’d write a much simpler bill. I’d love to see a four-page bill that bans proprietary trading and makes the board and chief executive responsible for compliance. And I’d have strong regulators. If the banks didn’t comply with the spirit of the bill, they’d go after them.”

He says he likes the fact that the proposed regulations, complex as they are, make top management and boards responsible for compliance. “If they think it’s too complicated, they have no one to blame but themselves,” he said of the banks.

Do we need to go back to the drawing board?

“Here’s the key word in the rules: ‘exemption,’ ” former Senator Ted Kaufman, Democrat of Delaware, told me. “Let me tell you, as soon as you see that, it’s pronounced ‘loophole.’ That’s what it means in English.” Mr. Kaufman, now teaching at Duke University School of Law, earlier proposed a tougher version of the Volcker Rule, which was voted down in the Senate. “We’ve been through this before,” he said. “I know these folks, these Wall Street guys. I went to school with them. They’re smart as hell. You give them the smallest little hole, and they’ll run through it.”

“I support the concept of the Volcker Rule,” Representative Peter Welch, Democrat of Vermont, said, “but these rules aren’t going to be effective. We’ve taken something simple and made it complex. The fact that it’s 300 pages shows the banks pushing back and having it both ways.”

And these are Democratic critics of the proposed regulations. An overwhelming number of Republicans oppose them, as they have virtually every aspect of Dodd-Frank. Even Senator Richard Shelby, Republican of Alabama, the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban affairs, who was the lone Republican to support the tougher Brown-Kaufman legislation, dismisses the latest incarnation.

“This proposal, however, is filled with central questions that Congress should have answered before even drafting Dodd-Frank,” said Jonathan Graffeo, a spokesman for Senator Shelby. “Instead, Congress willfully ignored the ramifications of its actions, just as it did in repealing Glass-Steagall.”

Yet the Volcker Rule, or something like it, could be the most important reform measure to emerge from the financial crisis.

If there was any doubt about that, this week the Securities and Exchange Commission unveiled its latest charges involving mortgage-backed securities. In what may be a new low for conduct by a major Wall Street firm in the walk-up to the financial crisis, Citigroup settled charges (without admitting or denying guilt) that it defrauded investors by creating a package of mortgage-backed securities for which it selected a pool of mortgages likely to default, bet against the security for the bank’s benefit by shorting it and then foisted it off on unwitting investors without disclosing any of this.

According to the S.E.C., one trader characterized this particular security in an all-too-candid e-mail as “possibly the best short EVER!”

Compared with this, Goldman Sachs mortgage traders look like Boy Scouts. In settling its fraud charges for $550 million last year, Goldman was accused by the S.E.C. of being the middleman in a similar deal, allowing the hedge fund manager John Paulson to help choose the mortgages and then bet against them without disclosing this to the other parties.

Citigroup dispensed with a Paulson figure altogether, grabbing those lucrative roles for itself. The S.E.C. said Citigroup earned fees of $34 million on this travesty and generated net profits of at least $126 million. (In a statement, Citigroup said it was pleased to put the matter behind it and has since “returned to the basics of banking.”) Nonetheless, Citigroup is paying just $285 million to settle the charges, and, needless to say, its chief executive at the time the deal was marketed and closed, Charles Prince, will pay nothing.  

I asked an S.E.C. enforcement lawyer if he could assure me that a transaction so brazenly fraudulent — not to mention risky, since a naked short ranks at or near the top of high-risk strategies — would be unambiguously prohibited under the proposed Volcker regulations. “There are some tricky definitions in there,” he said. “Could this be interpreted as hedging? But this was a naked short by the bank, and I believe it would be prohibited.”

I found this less than reassuring, since you can bet that if there was a way to call it hedging, lawyers would find it, and at the very least, years of costly litigation would result.

Last week I stopped by to see the financier Henry Kaufman, a former managing director of Salomon Brothers, a former Lehman Brothers board member and author of “The Road to Financial Reformation” (and no relation to Ted Kaufman, the former senator), who has been arguing for years that the proposed Volcker Rule doesn’t go far enough.

“Nobody listened,” he said. Mr. Kaufman has witnessed, by his count, 15 major financial crises since he and his family fled the Nazis when he was 10 years old. 

“Paul Volcker and I are the same age,” 84, he observed. “Paul wanted to take an aspect of risk-taking out of the financial conglomerates. That’s a worthy endeavor. But the history of regulation shows that the private sector pushes back and waters it down. Dodd-Frank didn’t want to address the longer-term consequences of ‘too big to fail.’ The 10 largest banks held 10 percent of the assets in 1990; today they control over 70 percent. This trend accelerated in 2008. The ‘too big to fail’ got even bigger.”

“My view is that we should break up the big financial conglomerates and separate investment banking,” he continued. “Otherwise we’re going to have ongoing government intervention in the credit allocation process. That threatens economic democracy, and the U.S. is the last bastion of economic democracy.”  

Financial concentration also worries Congressman Welch, who has called for an antitrust investigation into whether big banks recently colluded to charge debit card fees. “We need a strong financial sector,” he said. “But it should be in service to the real economy, the productive economy. The large banks have become trading platforms. They make the real money on the trading desks. The depositors, the consumers, become a base to fund that trading activity. There should be a separation and there certainly should not be a taxpayer backstop for their losses. Contrast this to the Main Street banks facing severe pressures from the big banks. Their model is more traditional, in service to the productive economy. In Washington the debate is about the needs of the large banks, but there’s no debate about the basic function of these banks. Do we want the financial sector to be in the service of the producing economy, or vice versa? It’s time we call the question.”

Former Senator Kaufman, Congressman Welch and Mr. Kaufman are all part of a chorus calling for a return to the separation of commercial and investment banking once embodied in the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act, which was repealed in 1999.

“The need for 300 pages of rules just shows you’re trying to define something indefinable,” Mr. Kaufman said. “I think Paul Volcker is great, but let’s step back and ask, why are we doing this? We‘re doing this because we don’t want banks with federal deposit insurance to be involved in risky investments. There’s a simple solution. We didn’t have that problem for over 60 years because we had Glass-Steagall. It worked, we changed it and guess what, we got into trouble. I want to go back to what worked for 60 years. That’s a very conservative position.”

 Critics of a return to Glass-Steagall note that Lehman Brothers was an investment bank, and Glass-Steagall would not have prevented its failure. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley were investment banks (and would probably be so again), and yet they were still too big to fail.

Mr. Volcker said that reinstating Glass-Steagall was unrealistic in today’s political climate. “It was a magnificent piece of legislation that didn’t need any regulations,” he said. “Do you think they could rewrite Glass-Steagall today without 300 pages?”

Even if Glass-Steagall isn’t a panacea, it would be a start. It would put a firewall around federally insured institutions, protecting taxpayers and helping contain the crisis as well as potential future ones.

“I don’t know if this Congress will address this,” Ted Kaufman said. “I won’t try to forecast. But I believe from the bottom of my being that we’ll eventually have to restore Glass-Steagall. The only question is, How much agony do we have to go through before we do it? We know the solution, but do we have the will?”

In the meantime, “It scares the hell out of me. We can’t afford to have this happen again.”

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Why Tesla (Ticker: TSLA)

03 Tuesday Dec 2013

Posted by Sudarshan Sridharan in News

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Tags

America, American, Auto, Autobahn, Automobile, Car, Cars, Conspiracy, Conspiracy Theory, Finance, Germany, Investing, money, Monkey, Monkeys, SEC, Stock, Stocks, Tesla, Theory, Ticker, Tickers, TSLA


Tesla soared TWENTY DOLLARS ($20.53 actually) when investigators in Germany said that there was absolutely NO problem with Tesla. The investigators also continued to give out praise for the automaker saying that they had never inspected a car as safe yet as amazing a ride as the Tesla. Coming from people in the Autobahn capitol of the world, I’d think that the $20.53 jump is well justified, and Salesforce ads just helped Tesla. Remember, it is widely known now that Tesla is a buy and hold, but I’d honestly sell before the American report is out. Why? Because Elon Musk is South African, not American (and as much as I hate to say this), the last time a non-american took on the highly competitive Americans (I’m American so I have no idea why I’m referring to America as foreign country…), he lost. Think about it, Nikolov Tesla, the man who’s name is now remembered almost 150 – 200 years later as the name of Tesla’s car brand, also took on America. In particular, he took on Thomas Edison and the light bulb. Although Tesla applied for a patent 16 months before Edison had, Edison was given the patent. Tesla’s light bulb’s were safer and more efficient, but he was Russian, not American. I realize that this is a conspiracy theory, but history repeats itself. The inventor of the original Paper clip was German, but the American who applied for the patent won it. Same with the creator of the airplane. I’m not sure what his name was, he was French, but he was quickly shot down by the Americans. I completely wandered off on a tangent here, but history tends to repeat itself, and I think that it is going to repeat itself for Tesla, and ultimately drive the stock back to where it was last week, $106.26.

 

Well that’s the PrimePick for today, enjoy, and comment on what you think is going to happen to TESLA.

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Perfect Penny Stocks

02 Monday Dec 2013

Posted by Sudarshan Sridharan in News

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DSNY, FRMC, GOFF, Invest, Investing, Investor, PWEI, Stock, Stocks, Ticker, Tickers, XUII


I felt like this just had to be shared. DSNY (Destiny Media Technologies Inc.) and FRMC (Formcap Corp) are perfect buys. Although some say the ship has sailed for DSNY (soaring 16% today), I couldn’t agree less. Most penny stocks (i.e. GOFF, PWEI, XUII) have an initial day where they soar, then the following days they stagnate a little, then around 3 trading days later they soar and keep it up. Both DSNY (gaining close to 50 cents today), and FRMC (gaining 12 cents on the day) are in this initial first day trend. Tomorrow it should stagnate (you should buy them tomorrow around 11 am). Just thought that this might help some of you Penny Stock Traders!

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Random News on our favorite Nasdaq Stocks: Google, Tesla, Netflix

23 Saturday Nov 2013

Posted by Sudarshan Sridharan in News

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Tags

Disney, DSY, GOOG, Google, Hero, Heroes, Netflix, NFLX, Revenue, Stock, Stocks, Super, Super Hero, Tesla, Ticker, Tickers, TSLA


TESLA:

The Consumer Reports report came out with car rating and guess what….

The results offer a rare piece of good news for Tesla, which has faced increasingly tough questions after three cars caught fire in less than two months. This week, U.S. regulators launched a safety probe into the Model S.

“Owners of the Tesla Model S gave it the highest owner-satisfaction score Consumer Reports has seen in years: 99 out of 100,” the magazine said.

After the Model S, the Porsche Boxster sports car came in second place with a score of 95. The Porsche 911 sports car and Chevrolet Volt, made by General Motors Co, both got a 91.

I got that nice piece from an article on 4-Traders.com

GOOGLE:

You gotta love dividends. Especially when a stock which is valued at $1500.00 is trading at $1,031.00 Read this…..

Google (GOOG), the third largest company by market cap in the world has been on a tear lately. It’s shares are trading just shy of an all time high, and investors are rejoicing. And soon, shareholders will have another reason to cheer – Google may be just a few months away fromannouncing its first dividend. The blogosphere and analysts have beenbuzzing with speculation on this subject for the last year, and now the writing may be on the wall.

Google fights every day to win over consumers, and the Google investor relations team works diligently from morning to night working to please investors. With major tech competitors such as Apple (AAPL), Microsoft (MSFT) and Cisco (CSCO) all returning huge shareholder value via buybacks and dividends, Google will have little choice but to join the tech stock dividend bonanza. Considering Google’s massive cash hoard and abundant free cash flow, it seems like a very small price to pay.

I got the little snippet from seekingalpha.com

NETFLIX:

So I heard you liked Agents of Shield…

Netflix, Inc. (NFLX) has inked a deal with The Walt Disney Company (DIS) to develop and produce a number of original shows featuring Marvel Super Heroes. Marvel Studios confirmed this story based on its press release last November 7.

This is another great news for Netflix investors who firmly believes in the company’s momentum growth. The deal gives Netflix the opportunity to further enhance its original content strategy. After the success of its original shows like House of Cards, Arrested Development, and Orange is the new Black, Netflix has the chance to reach out to a different demographic by producing action TV series starring Marvel’s heroes.

Yep that should be good news for many key investors. Maybe Carl Icahn wants to join the Netflix Bandwagon again?

Hope this little weekend update helps! Enjoy!

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