Stock Market – Weekly Preview

I’ve got a couple of picks for long term growth and a couple conditional picks. The portfolio ended the week 10-10, 100% in terms of win/lose over last week. 1.78% increase overall – would have been a gain of $1,288.25 if the money were real.

Mutual Funds:
Latin America is a good, relatively safe place to have your money right now in terms of opportunity for fast growth. While Asia is cooling down, the right fund manager will make you some money. Utilities, Construction and Coal are the three domestic sectors worth your time, in terms of both individual picks and funds investment. I’m still a fan of gold, but not so much mining or mineral companies in general.

Letting go of the Price N. Asia and Fidelity China funds – at a profit of $110.00 (minus two seperate broker fees of course, more like $85). Keeping everything else for the time being, but probably going to identify a Construction or Utilities Fund to funnel this $13, 227 into.

Stocks:
As for blue chips, Apple-Altria-Prudential, were all gainers last week. Hold on to Apple as there’s a lot going on this fall with ITunes technology integrating with cellphones. Not holding it anywhere past September though as Creative has been awarded a patent for the functionality Ipod uses to file and retrieve tracks. That wheel setup apparantly was a part of Creative’s products a year before the first Ipod was sold. Apple has plenty of money and some time now to prove Creative wrong…in other words, find a product that had a similar design. The timeline of all this going down is out there a bit, but not long enough to retain your position past December unless it goes through the roof.

Altria and Prudential are a couple of corporations on my ‘all-market’ team, and it’s going to be a cold day in hell when either falls apart. Anticipating payouts from the hurricane though, I’m letting go of PRU, which will put another $8,210 in the mock account.

New Picks:
First one is the online poker site, Party Poker PYGMF. Recent IPO has the shares valued at $2.90. I hadn’t heard about the company going public until this weekend, and I’m assuming the same goes for a lot of potential investors. Opening bell for the mock portfolio we’re getting 2000 shares for $5,900.

There are no financial statements to look at yet, but anyone who’s been paying attention to the growth of this plague knows full well that it’s as addictive as crack and attracting all kinds of people from all over the world everyday. Still skeptical? Ask yourself this, ‘would you invest in the local indian casino if you had the opportunity to’? They have to pay for employees, insurance, security, etc. Party Poker maintains a mainframe and outsources customer service…most likely to India. So they’re raking percentages equal to a casino without nearly as much overhead.

Second pick – QBID – This is a production company that specializes in media aimed at the gay/lesbian/transgendered community. A subject I don’t have a lot of words for, but I will say this…there are a LOT of them out there, and I’ll assume most of them own TVs. I’ve been watching this one for over a year as it’s gone from under a penny to 4 cents a couple of times in the past year. Getting a sale in on one of those days after purchasing it at $.0014 has it’s obvious appeal, but it was these two articles I read that convinced me it was finally time to take the plunge and see whether this dog will hunt. Q Television — Valued at Ten Times its Current Market Capitalization — Issues Financials, QBID Hires a Team to Investigate Stock Manipulation. For the mock portfolio, I’m going with $2,800, which nets 2 million shares.

Third stock is Southwest Airlines (LUV) which I’ll be getting into on the condition that oil goes down this week. US Air is another possibility, but in terms of vulture investment in any airlines, I’m pretty much inclined to see most of the bankruptcy proceedings for these firms to come close to finalization before sinking my teeth into any of them. For active, moderately healthy airlines though, the drop in oil prices, especially for Southwest (which appears to be in a natural lull that history tells us will end this week) will produce a quicker upturn and potential to sell

Forth and final stock pick for this week is American Safety Insurance Holdings (ASI) at around $17.50/share. The company made some bad mistakes getting into real estate…well, that’s over and with it’s focus where it should be, the stock is undervalued. One statistic that stands out most is that over the past 7 years, they’ve paid out only 62 cents in claims for every premium dollar. The industry normally pays more than this. Barron’s recomended this stock as well. For the mock portfolio we’ll go in for 500 shares, $8,750.

I’ll update the portfolio and repost once I can get a peek at the ask prices tomorrow morning.