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Monday, February 25, 2008

Swing Trade : Agrium Inc. (NYSE:AGU)

Summary

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I've previously talked about the Agricultural Chemical stocks as one of the sectors in a sweet sector-wide uptrend. I've previously traded Potash Corp (NYSE:POT) as a way to take advantage of the sector trend. Well, POT broke out to new ATH's recently, and I was left on the outside looking in. Not wanting to miss the bandwagon, I took a long position this morning in Agrium Inc. (NYSE:AGU).


There were four reasons that I went long:
1. great looking daily chart of a stock in a sector uptrend
2. AGU gapped up and saw follow through buying on Friday.
3. Today's opening drop only partially retraced Friday's follow through buying.
4. Tape looked bullish near the end of today's morning pullback.


Initial stop is at 68.9, I anticipate new ATH's
This was an instance where buying the morning pullback was the right play to make.


UPDATE: moving my stop up to breakeven @71.5

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What's New

Summary

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Back in the days when I first started this blog, I would love to be that hamster who would run on the hamster wheel for that piece of blogging carrot.


Now that's it's been over a year later, it's been getting harder for me to contribute decent content to this blog. That's one of the reasons that I haven't been blogging lately.

What else is new? Well, that company that I had the phone interview with? That secret company was Google. They called, we talked, I found out that they were looking for Java programmers, and as hard as I tried to sell myself, I couldn't hide the fact that I didn't have very many years of experience in working on Java programming projects. Oh well, that's the way the dice rolls..... Yup, as much as you plan and prepare, sometimes life is like the roll of a dice. It is what it is.

I've been watching COIN, LNN, DBA for the past couple of weeks. There were opportunities to enter long positions, but I just did not pull the trigger. I'd like to hide behind the usual excuse of being too busy with work, but in reality, it wouldn't have taken much time to enter those trades. Do I not care enough about successfully swing trading stocks? Is it too boring or tiresome to look for stocks to swing trade? Should I find more questions to which I don't have the answers? I don't know, although I do admit, I kind of miss trading futures now.....

Luckily the market is going mostly nowhere right now, so I still have some time to snap out of my current apathetic attitude.


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Saturday, February 02, 2008

Recession Watch: News from the Trenches

Posting will be a bit more sporadic in the coming weeks as a work deadline approaches.

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I was at work the other day trying to figure out who I can get in touch with to handle an IT task that my department is currently facing. I emailed one of my contacts and he eventually got back to me with the info that I needed, but also informed me that some people in his company had been laid off. Layoffs in itself is not a newsworthy item, but what was interesting was the response I got when I probed for more details. I was actually contacted by another person who worked at the same company as my contact, and he informed me he was one of the people who was laid off. We talked for a bit, and he told me that one of the reasons for the (relatively) big round of layoffs was because the company was anticipating 2 to 3 quarters of little to no growth in revenues.
This was a mid-sized company (just under 1000 employees) in the high tech sector with headquarters in Silicon Valley. Now if they are trimming head count in anticipation of a slowdown in growth, it makes me wonder how many more tech companies are thinking the same thing?

Anyways, on a more personal note, I was contacted by recruiter the other day. Normally I don't talk about these things, and I was actually planning to wean myself from my current job. But this recruiter was from a special company, one that I would give my left arm and right pinky toe for an opportunity to contribute to their success. I've got a phone interview next Wednesday, and I just hope I can nail down that phone interview.

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