Nagel Family Website

Blog changes

Hi, and thanks for stopping by! We've made some big changes to the blog - including shutting it down! With social networking and micro-blogging these days, there's no need for us to blog. So check out the latest on our homepage, and thanks for visiting.

All the news I read & listen to today is about the plan by Bush (and others) to help borrowers with their subprime mortgages. However, the plan, as I understand it, is to simply freeze rate hikes for 5 years.

How does this fix the problem? Isn’t it just delaying the problem?

This entry was posted by Eric on Thursday, December 6th, 2007 at 8:55 am and is filed under Finance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

My eBay auctions are moving right along! Each one has a bid placed, and a couple of them have a lot of watchers. I have a feeling I’ll get a lot of bids Friday & Saturday, as the auctions come close to an end. My strategy of post on Saturday for 7 days, collect payment Saturday, Sunday & Monday and ship on Monday seems to be a good one.

I’m being a little tricky when posting my auctions – see, the auctions have thumbnails of the images, but when you click them, they come to my website. Then if you click again to return to eBay, I set my affiliate cookie. So far, it’s given me another $5 in revenue, and I haven’t even sold anything! The $5 comes from people winning other auctions, after viewing mine.

Don’t worry – I checked the eBay terms & it states:

(5) Affiliate Links. You may use affiliate links to promote your own eBay listings or eBay Store, those of your Agents or those of anyone else with whom you are affiliated. eBay may terminate this provision at any time with 7 days notice. You may not include affiliate links on any eBay.com page or eBay-owned page, such as an eBay listing or eBay Store.

So I’m not breaking the rules. Think outside the box & earn more!

This entry was posted by Eric on Wednesday, November 21st, 2007 at 10:03 am and is filed under Finance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

I don’t think I’ve yet made a single post outlining my investment strategy. There are plenty of posts about little bits & pieces, but not a single post that outlines it all. This post will attempt to do that.

First, I’m not formally educated on investing. Serious investors may think this is the biggest joke ever, but it works for me, giving me just over 30% returns year after year. Even when times are bad, there are stocks that will go up.

Let’s start with a simple concept: what makes a stock price rise? P/E ratio? Earnings? Leaked news? No. Much simpler than that.

A stock price will rise when there are more buyers than sellers.

So I don’t care what’s going on with the company – as long as I know what others think of a stock, I can generally pick good ones. So what do I look at?

In the end, I look at the NetNagel Stock Index, which is an ever-evolving formula that takes numerous sources into consideration. The one constant, however, is that I need a stock that’s positioned to go up at least 33%. That’s my trigger point. I also look at ratings on other websites and analyst opinions.

So let’s say I find a stock that I like… say OXPS. I love OXPS, actually. Not today, but I loved it about a year ago. So I ran out and bought some, then bought some more when it went down.

I should make a side-note here that if I believe in a stock, it goes down, and there is no reason for me to change my opinion on the stock, I buy more. Now, it has to go down enough to make it worth-while… say 10%. OK, back on track…

I then figure in my commissions: $7 per buy, and $7 to sell. I keep track of the dividends I’ve received from the stock, and from that I have a total cost (shares & price paid plus commissions minus dividends). Now take the total cost, divided by the total shares, plus 33% and that’s my target selling point. Finally, take the target selling point, divided into the total cost and that’s how many shares I will sell at that price. Here’s my OXPS example:

Shares: 118
Paid: $23.3839
Commissions: $21.00 (I bought twice, and will sell once (well, I’ll sell twice, but only once short-term))
Dividends: $22.14
Total cost: $2,758.16
Target price: $31.17
Sell off: 88.5

Paid: $2,758.16
Sell 89 at $31.17
Remaining: 29 (valued at $903.80 )
Cashed in $2,773.74

What I’ve done is sold enough to cover my initial cost, but held onto the rest. That’s my “profit”. I’ve done this time & time again, and in doing so have built up a wide portfolio that includes FDO, DLB, JBLU, DIS, CDL, VEIEX, GRMN, YHOO, UTI, NTDOY.PK, PRAA, IRBT, and ADY.

The final element to my investing strategy is that I must understand the company that I’m buying. You’ll hear that a lot from other places, too. You can understand the numbers, but if you don’t understand what the company does, how can you be confident in your buy? Doing this means my portfolio is a bit tech-heavy, but I also own a couple coffee stocks (I love my coffee), retail stores, financial institutes, an automaker, a railroad, energy companies, and others.

One word of caution: investing in foreign markets can be tricky. Not only do you have to look at the company you’re investing in, but also the currency fluctuations that’ll affect the stock price.

Now be strict with this plan… once you’ve bought your stock, figure out what your target sell price is, and put that sell order in! It’s OK to do a trailing stop, though… you can squeeze out a few more bucks, and still be OK if the stock comes back down.

This entry was posted by Eric on Wednesday, October 17th, 2007 at 10:51 am and is filed under Finance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

In accordance with my investing strategy, I sold ADY today for a 35.28% gain. I bought ADY on July 20th. Of course, I only sold my initial investment, and kept 10 shares as my “profit”.

ADY is a milk company based in China. Even though more than 90% of Chinese adults have lactose intolerance, this company focuses on schoolchildren and I believed their alliance with the Chinese government would prove to be profitable for the company (well, at least profitable for me).

I took the proceeds from the sale and re-invested in Toyota. This is my second purchase of TM, averaging down my price per share to $120.48. I’m now looking to sell at $162.80. Long term, TM will get there. They’re leading the auto-industry, IMO, and with rising gas prices and Toyota setting the bar for fuel-efficient vehicles, I believe TM is a good buy.

A few other stocks are on the verge of being sold, including WLT, OXPS, TIVO. Even my emotional pick, Tim Horton’s, is up nearly 20%. Go-go Timmy Ho!

This entry was posted by Eric on Thursday, October 11th, 2007 at 10:03 am and is filed under Finance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Garmin was upgraded today, so the stock is up. Wee!

However, it was upgraded from a “sell” to “neutral” by AmTech Research. AmTech Research put a “sell” on Garmin when it was $43 / share. Since then, it’s paid $1.25 in dividends & rose to a high near $120 / share.

Should we even listen to these chuckleheads at AmTech? Doesn’t seem they have any clue as to what’s going on.

Moral of the story: do your research before you buy.

This entry was posted by Eric on Monday, October 8th, 2007 at 11:06 am and is filed under Finance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

I made another investment yesterday in a Tortilla sales business. Well, not really an investment, but a micro-loan.

I loaned $25 to Antonia del Carmen Viera Arguijo in Honduras so she could buy corn and firewood for her business. Over the next 9 months, she’ll repay the loan, and then I can get my money back, or use the $25 as a loan to someone else. It’s a pretty neat program – read up on it at kiva.org.

This entry was posted by Eric on Wednesday, September 26th, 2007 at 10:41 am and is filed under Finance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.