Investing Journey: Week 9 Recap
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“Buy stocks as you would groceries: when they are on sale” — Christopher Browne
What a week for my portfolio! It started with President Trump testing positive for COVID-19, causing the markets to dive. News on “the miracle drugs” played a huge role in BioPharm stock recovery — luckily for me, BioPharm takes up about 60% of my portfolio!
* NOTE: diversification is important to reduce idiosyncratic risk folks *
Then we had an evening dip, as President Trump tweeted that he would reject any stimulus deal proposed by the Democrats. Which he quickly regressed the following day, by claiming that he would accept a deal which would give the American people, each $1200. This immediately meant that I had my eyes on retail/consumer good stocks. Think the likes of Costo, Walmart and At Home.
The latter has really been on quite the run this week:
Furthermore, TSLA saw a nice dip because of this Trump tweet.
I managed to enter at a very nice price of $412.42 in the evening of the Trump tweet when the whole market seemed to react negatively. What I realised was, that even though President Trump had tweeted what he did, if the American people were calling for a further stimulus package — he would come to his senses and agree to it. Otherwise, it would be safe to say his re-election chances would have been rather grim. This set up a nice swing trade, in which I managed to sell my small position in TSLA at $436 a couple of days later.
The ability to judge the validity of news and then to interpret how the market will react to this news.
This is one of the most important skills one must develop, particularly, when you are day trading or swing trading. The only way one can truly develop this skill is to practice.
Here is a suggestion for those who want to practice swing/momentum trading:
- Open a paper account and only make trades that are reactive to news
- You must not keep these trades open for longer than a few days
- Now you can judge how well you react to the news, without any of the material risks involved in live trading
I digress. So, what I am doing with my portfolio is very high risk — particularly, given that BioPharm stocks are amongst the most volatile and prone to huge dips in a short time frame. This is because any negative news e.g. poor trial phase drug results or bad side-effects will dramatically affect the stock price. If you don’t believe me, please check on the investors of Satsuma Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: STS)
That being said, I am confident in the investments that I have made. They have great pipelines, and both BCRX and XERS have reported positive news recently, with further catalysts to come in Q4. The important thing with BioPharm investments is that you need to be comfortable with volatility and you must really know what you are investing in — that means to conduct thorough due diligence.
Aside from the fundamentals and the product analysis, here is a very brief look at some of the technical analysis I conducted for XERS this week:
As we can see XERS has followed the blue trend lines I have drawn. Due to the cool-off in RSI, the favourable shift in MACD and my trend line all indicating that we would see a gap up soon — I managed to scoop up a further 175 shares at a $5.66 average cost on a secondary account.
I believe that with ANY positive PR, particularly if it is regarding Regeneron using Xeris proprietary technology, this stock will go through the roof (indicated by the top blue trend line). I currently have an $8 price target for EOY and it is looking good.
A new stock that I had the opportunity to invest in this week, was Cleanspark Inc. (NASDAQ: CLSK). They announced a public offering at $9/share earlier this week, which caused their share price to drop significantly.
For me, this presented a perfect buy-in opportunity in a stock which I had previously conducted my due diligence on but had missed my entry price.
However, the activity today was beyond irrational…
CLSK dropped significantly in pre-market due to an opinion article by a research firm. Yes, you heard that right, the stock dropped 15% because of an opinion article on Seeking Alpha… Granted, maybe the fact that the offering also closes on Friday played a part, nevertheless, this short was criminal!
You already know what I was doing while this was happening!
I added on every single dip I could. I even sold my sold Tesla share which I had purchased earlier this week to add to CLSK. Only time can tell if that was the right decision, but given that TSLA is also rather volatile, I felt that I could generate better returns with this stock. My price target for the next 3–6 months is $16.
One thing I have noticed in my very short time investing in the markets is this:
Whenever people start panic selling on “fake news” e.g. a Trump Tweet or an opinion article. It is a major buying opportunity!
Warren Buffet said it best:
“Be fearful when others are greedy. Be greedy when others are fearful.”
This epitomises exactly what I am trying to convey. I have only traded on the markets for less than 3 months now and I can give you so many instances in my portfolio stocks alone, of this being true:
- XERS on the FDA warning letter
- XERS on the “poor script results”
- XERS a third time for no apparent reason whatsoever
- TSLA on the Trump tweet about no stimulus
- BCRX following positive phase one results
- CLSK on a negative opinion article
The list goes on…
The bottom line: FEAR GENERATES OPPORTUNITY.
Finally, the results of my high-risk portfolio so far!
I think the best way to grade my portfolio performance is to benchmark it against the market — in this case, the S&P 500.
The S&P 500 has returned 4.30% since I started trading.
My passive portfolio is currently sitting on a 10.79% return. Granted, this does not take into consideration any of my realised gains/losses — however, I don’t think I should include any of the 2–3 day, day trades, in the calculation of my passive portfolio return. Most of my current investments in this portfolio, I deem to be medium-term investments (3–6 months), therefore, I will use this figure.
So, overall the portfolio has not performed too badly. There was one point in early September where I liquidated a significant portion of this portfolio in order to redirect my investments (seen by that massive drop). However, you can see that the difference between the blue line and the faint grey dashed line, has been slowly growing since about halfway through this journey.
I look forward to seeing where this takes me and will pick up on this again on Medium, in a couple of months time.
Legal Disclosure: I’m not a financial advisor. The information contained in this article is for entertainment purposes only. Before investing, please consult a licensed professional. Any stock purchases I show in this article should not be considered “investment recommendations”. I shall not be held liable for any losses you may incur for investing and trading in the stock market in an attempt to mirror what I do. Unless investments are FDIC insured (US), they may decline in value and/or disappear entirely. Please be careful!
If you represent a tech-startup based in the UK and are seeking funding, please do get in touch.
As a venture scout, the firm I represent is looking for technology startups that have already gained traction and have displayed some form of revenues.
Comments/questions? gouthamslali@gmail.com
