Ides of March Contest

[jiesen]

thnx for putting on the fun contest, billyjoe! congrats on winning it!

[riverbabe]

River,
Thanks. You have my permission to close the office at OPBL.OB now. The wolf at the door is starving.

-----------billyjoe

p.s. what's with the incredible contrasts between your winning picks and the other not so successful ones. Very curious.

Don't know. Have wondered myself. Am looking back and learning from these. I think the not-successful ones are too impulsive and risk taking. Like OPBL.OB - it all depended on being bought out and, when the suitor dumped it, it folded. And too much of the business depended on just that one customer. I never would have invested in it in real life. I picked it for the contest on an impulse to try to make a grand last minute showing. An ego thing, maybe, because I am up against all you guys who have been doing this for so long and so much better.

Like NFI, I took a risk that the mortgage crisis would be much less or the end would be in sight by the 4th quarter and the stocks of the lenders would go up in anticipation of that news because the market anticipates 6 months in advance. Silly me. Actually my first choice was TWLL, but sweet pea beat me to that.

Like ESLR: That was a calculated move. I own FSLR and it was making dramatic upward leaps this week. ESLR was just lagging a couple of days behind it. So I took a chance on Thursday that it would catch up by Friday. And it did.

It's good to learn from mistakes, and also from successes. What works and what doesn't, and get the darned ego out of the way!