Free Stock Tips

You are certainly not alone for there are folks with real money at play who are pulling their hair out.

In my own case, with my own money, in the three months before this one I gained 40%, but I lost 60% in the nine months prior. Just this month I’m down close to 18%. On my pension plan at the non-profit I work for we recently changed program administration companies. Most of my co-workers lost something like 50-60%, but the people checking the paperwork were all quizzing me as to how I only lost about 12% (I saw it coming and repositioned).

It is possible that your school stock project might be won by someone who loses least.

Now for the short selling, you have a possible advantage somewhere. Most stocks can only be shorted “on the up-tick” the price has to be rising at the last trade or you can’t do it. A fun little trick is to trade Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) because those can be shorted while going down. Another problem with shorting, however, in the real world you won’t always be able to ‘borrow’ shares of what you want to short because of so much short interest.

How do you know which ones? You don’t usually.

ISF (Ing Group) started a nice slide from about 5.15 or so last Wednesday. This morning it started at $3, dropped a nickel, then did a nice little cannonball arc to $4.40-something. How would you know? Well, you might see something at $3 that goes to $3.30 (10%) might be interesting and jump in, but some classroom things don’t let you day trade (most real life accounts won’t either). About a year ago ISF was around $20, yesterday it got down to $2.60. Not exactly one to impress your teacher and classmates.

Take a gander at these: TOH, BIG, TDC, CF, FDO, CRM, AZO, MYL, DF, SGP. Each tend to be bucking the downward trend. They may still do so after the market turns back south tomorrow. Part of the problem, you must bear in mind, is it will be like fishing or hunting — you may have to wait for your plan to work.