Archive for the ‘Cheap Reference’ Category

Big Bang Bid Buy BIG?

Tuesday, August 4th, 2009

There’s a new newsletter I signed up for (Pristine) that pointed me at Big Lots (BIG).  My rule about buying the stock of the stuff I buy is about doing so early on, where I have been shopping there for years (in fact, the desk I am writing this from I bought there).

So, today the numbers look good. I’m cheap (are you getting that?), so I am going to wait on a pullback from the current ~$23 to somewhere in the 20′s . Hopefully it will be shortly before an earnings announcement as I notice they are good about providing a positive surprise there.

What Are Venture Capitalists Up To Now?

Thursday, July 9th, 2009

Knowing that can sometimes be helpful in picking a hot sector or knowing why an IPO may or may not be a good bet. RedHerring.com is a good source for this type of information, and has interesting content.

What Some Stock Newsletters Would Do Otherwise

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

Dilbert.com

Does This Really Work?

Friday, June 5th, 2009

As a result of being cheap and subscribing to lots of free investment info, I get more than my fair share of emails advertising to idiots. One of my a favorites (mentioned last week but received again this week) offers “free stock picks” for paying for a stock pick newsletter. Does that mean the free ones are good and the one you pay for are worthless, or vice versa?

Anyway, today’s junk mail was this offer for a special report of ten top picks. I would have bit, knowing full well it would increase the work of my spam filter. But then I noticed that they had eight links in the email to the same place to get the free report. Which tells me that they are either too dumb to hire a good web copy writer for their pitches or are only looking for people so dumb that they have to be shown eight times how to get something for free. I can understand two (top and bottom of the email), even three if it is a really long email. But eight links? Nah, that’s too many. I’ll pass.

If you want to get it anyway, those eight links point to http://www.newsletteradvisors.com. It actually came with a parameter, but that probably confirms my email address as a sucker, so I’m leaving it off.

New Good Link

Thursday, June 4th, 2009

Thanks to the Stock Gumshoe for recommending Woman With Portfolio

Get Out Now!

Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009

Well, actually, I think you should consider it heavily first. What got me excited was to see an investment newsletter article that was recommending what to get out of without having already charged folks to tell them to get into it. But, this is cheap and lazy investing, not cynical investment advice reviewing, so I’ll just point you to the article that prompted my thinking on this topic over at Investor Place.

I haven’t done the research on their recommendations yet. I will say, when it comes to consumer stocks, I always expect the run to be a fad, try to find it on the way up, and then figure a point where I can get out with a small profit and what I call “free stock”, which means that I managed to sell enough of the stock I bought within a year to profit 15% (to cover the taxes) and still have stock to hang on to. If the stock goes down, I’m not really out anything except the satisfaction of “I told you so”. This only failed once, with Washington Mutual. If I had dumped it all, I would have doubled my money in 14 hours. Instead, I had a one day high, and now own stock that would cost more in commission to sell than I could get for it. Maybe 20 years from now, people will collect loser stocks like cars that didn’t sell well.

YATTL

Friday, May 29th, 2009

Yeah, I just made that one up: Yet Another Top Ten List. The Dolan’s have much more time to write (or borrow) content than I do. Keeping up my lazy rep, I’m just going to link to their list of free top ten articles on their site for May. You can be cheap by just reading them, and lazy by only following the parts that make cents.

The Check is in the Mail

Wednesday, May 27th, 2009

It’s easy to be cheap and lazy by reading the free material available from all the fee services. Thanks to the Internet, they have to give you enough truth to get you to buy. If you only follow one of them (what they hope), you will definitly feel compelled to buy eventually.  If you read many of them, you will get enough pieces to do it yourself. Considering that all the good newsletters are expensive, I’d just as soon get it for free.

There are some good tips on Dolans.com today with their article The 8 Biggest Lies That You Are Being Told About Your Money. There are ten pages to this one. The first is the intro, and the last is the pitch. Your call on where to stop. I noticed that some of the points are the selling points of their competition (brokers and retirement plans), which is all I have to say about that.

Get it From the Shorts

Tuesday, May 26th, 2009

Interesting article at InvestorsPlace.com today about how the folks that play the shorts can make you some short money on longs. I like the idea, as I’m too lazy and cheap to do shorts myself. The article is attributed to LearningMarkets.com, which appears to have some good info for those who want to learn how things works in the trading world.

Cheap Education on Being Cheap

Tuesday, May 26th, 2009

Eventually, probably, I will have some money-saving tips on this blog. Probably even a page devoted to it. I have been looking for ways to save money as soon as I had my second penny (the first one did not inspire me as it did not go “clink” against anything yet). In the meantime, you can subscribe to http://www.dolans.com/. The are not the do-all end-all of saving money, and you will get a flood of other emails from subsribing, but in general they have some good advise for free. Being the cheap guy that I am, I never look at any of their fee services, and rarely look at their free advise as most of it is old news to me. But it may not be to you, and I did say “most”, not “all”. Any newsletter is worth my time if I get one idea or learning from it. If that is all I get for a very long stretch I will drop it, which has to do with being cheap with my time and too lazy to read everything.