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What do you do when half of your business is being threatened with a major lawsuit? Split the business in two, to protect the other half. That’s exactly what EchoStar is doing now in loom of Tivo’s current court battle over DVR technology.

EchoStar says it could split its set-top box and manufacturing divisions from its DISH Network business.

As a Tivo shareholder, I’m a bit pissed. EchoStar knows they’re going to loose this one.

This entry was posted by Eric on Tuesday, September 25th, 2007 at 9:02 am and is filed under Business, Finance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

I like it when I make a decision, and then the decision is reaffirmed in something that I read. Just last week, I turned off my automatic deposits with Franklin Templeton and opted to manually send a check to Scottrade. I couldn’t stand the 5.77% fee I was being charged, taking the 2.1% from Scottrade instead.

CNNMoney has an article, “Are You a Better Investor?“, which verifies what I did was right.

If there’s a cheap way and an expensive way to solve an investing problem, stick with the cheap one

So now I’ll be doing my own investing with my IRA. I just have to make sure I spread it out a bit more, look towards ETFs, and be careful. Right now, I’m very heavy in the tech. market, but that’s because I invest in what I know.

I’ve already got a few choices lined up for the next buy… will post them after I buy.

This entry was posted by Eric on Tuesday, September 18th, 2007 at 12:57 pm 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.

Automation is a beautiful thing, and in finance, it works wonders. When I think of automating finances, I think of a book I read years ago, The Automatic Millionaire. I read this when I really had no idea what I was doing with my finances, but I still use some of the tactics I read even today.

If you haven’t noticed, the stock market lately hasn’t been doing so hot. But with my savings plan in place, I automatically buy low. See, I put aside $x per month for retirement savings. That $x does not change month to month, but the price of my investment does change (ideally, it goes up, but lately, it’s been down). So let’s see what happens:

Let’s say I invest $3,000 in a fund, and this month, the price per share is $60. I buy 50 shares. Next month, I still invest $3,000, but the price has gone up to $63 (yeah - I made money!). I only buy 47.62 shares. The amount I invest hasn’t changed, but because of the higher price, I buy fewer shares.

Then the market corrects itself, and the fund drops to $56 / share. Booh! I’m losing money, but because of the automatic savings, when I buy my $3,000 worth, I buy more shares! I pick up 53.57 shares this month, still costing me $3,000.

When the price per share is down, I buy more; when the price per share is up, I buy fewer shares. However, the amount of money I invest never changes. Automatically, the system takes care of the “buy low” concept.

Automation is great… in fact, this post will automatically be published tonight, while I’m at a Cub Scout meeting

This entry was posted by Eric on Tuesday, August 28th, 2007 at 7:13 pm 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.

Finally! This is one that scared me for a while, as I quickly bought into 3 times, but I was able to sell IRBT today at a 33% gain. I still hold my “profit” in 30 shares of IRBT, but used the initial buy-ins to average down my purchase price of NWY and WLT.

NWY has dropped so much since I bought it, but it still looks like a great stock to own. After I averaged down, my target “sell” price is lower than my initial “buy” price! That’s how much I was able to get my average price per share down! Analysts are looking for NWY to go to $13.00 - I’m getting out at $12.07.

WLT’s figures are strong, but I was down about 15%. 15% doesn’t worry me, but I saw this as an opportunity to buy more at a great bargain price. Analyst mean target is 31.75, but the fool.com CAPS figures look promising; I’m hoping to get $32.20 when I sell.

This entry was posted by Eric on Wednesday, August 15th, 2007 at 1:01 pm 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.

Like DemInvest, I’m going to let you know when I sell stocks, and take the “profits” and save them in my long-term portfolio.

Today, I got back from my lawyer’s and saw an e-mail from Scottrade that NTDOY was sold. I had an order to sell at 47.27, which executed. Here’s the history:

Bought 20 NTDOY on Feb-23, 2007 at 34.75. With a $7 buy commission, and $7 to sell it, my cost was $709. My target price was $47.27 (34%).

Today, I sold 15 NTDOY at 47.27, recouping $709.05 of the buy price. I still hold 5 shares, worth $236.33.

Now I need to find something else to buy… I may re-up on TIVO or ERTS. I have some research to do…

This entry was posted by Eric on Monday, July 2nd, 2007 at 1:21 pm 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.

Wow… I just read that this guy over here reads my blog for stock picks! How cool is that??? Sure, I have a pretty good track record, and we use similar buy & sell techniques (wait for a %, sell the initial investment, keep the profits as another position in your portfolio), but now I feel bad that I haven’t said to buy something in a while.

My last picks were OXPS and PRAA on January 31st. I’m still holding both of them. At that time, I was watching TIVO and IRBT and have also bought both of those.

Results:
OXPS - up 9.84%
PRAA - up 31.11% (almost time to sell)
TIVO - down 3.05%
IRBT - up 18.38%

Since I don’t have cash on hand, I haven’t been looking to buy anything, but I am looking to sell PRAA and NTDOY. They’re both just about 30%.

So how do I pick? Well, I start with the Motley Fool Stock Advisor and Hidden Gems. I login & look for picks that are DOWN from when they were recommended. Example: OXPS

OXPS is down 14.64% since it was recommended in November, 2006. There may be a reason, though, so I look at more data. deminvest is smart, so he looks at P/E ratios, etc. etc. etc. I look at what other people think.

I have a little PHP script that I plug in a ticker symbol, and it returns lots of useful information. Example:

esnagel:~/temp> php stocks/index.php OXPS
Data on OXPS
tickerobj Object
(
[fLastTrade] => 25.76
[fRecThisWeek] => 1.9
[fRecLastWeek] => 1.9
[fMeanTarget] => 29.67
[nNoBrokers] => 6
[aSurprises] => Array
(
["Jun-06"] => 3.6
["Sep-06"] => 4.0
["Dec-06"] => 6.9
["Mar-07"] => -2.9
)

[nCaps] => 5
[nTotalOutperforms] => 803
[nTotalUnderperforms] => 23
[nAllStarOutperforms] => 290
[nAllStarUnderperforms] => 5
[nWallStOutperforms] => 3
[nWallStUnderperforms] => 0
)

So it was last traded at 25.76, and 6 brokers have an average target set at 29.67. So you can expect a 15% return. That’s what those 6 analysts think. It’s rated a 1.9 - 1.0 is strong buy, 5.0 is strong sell. 1.9 is pretty good.

They missed the analyst opinion by 3% in March of 2007, but exceeded it (slightly) three quarters before that.

The Caps rating is 5. That’s big - 5 is the best it gets. But don’t just look at Caps - who says what? 803 of 826 rate the stock Outperform. More importantly, though, 290 of 295 all stars and 3 of 3 Wall St. professionals rate it Outperform.

When I buy, I don’t buy more than 3% of my entire portfolio. I do this because I’m ready to buy a stock 3 times. If I put 3% in each time, I’m done at 9%, safely under the 10% rule.

I’ve done this with Starbucks, and would buy more but I’d be breaking my own rules. 16 brokers say SBUX will get to 38.34; it’s currently at 26.75. That’s a 43% return! Go buy SBUX.

I’ll work on getting a page up that shows my holdings, purchase price, and ROI. That way, you’ll know when I buy, and can make a decision on your own if you want to buy yourself.

This entry was posted by Eric on Thursday, June 28th, 2007 at 12:55 pm 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.