CNBC Million Dollar Portfolio Challenge

Day 3

Boy did I ever get lucky today. The 400,000 dollars I had in the portfolio which hadn’t been used yet to buy any stocks really bailed me out. With 40% of my money protected from the volatile market today and 20% still in Google (which was down today but is still up from where I bought it Monday) I was protected from the downturn, Nasdaq was down .44%, Dow Jones was down .12% and S&P 500 was down .25%.

I won’t go through the list but 8 of my 18 stocks beat the market today(all of those went up), one tied the market and the rest were losses. My big winners today were CHB (up 4.47%), DAKT, GSF, MS, RAD, SHLD. The Losers were many, BRCD, CHTR, GS, etc etc.

The CNBC website just crashed so I can’t pull all of my numbers. I’ll update with the numbers later. Basically I’m going to be down about 1% today.

The big speculation today has been in the subprime lender group. This group of stocks includes commentor Plebe’s pick, NEW (up 2.79% today and was up about 10% yesterday). The subprime lender group is a group of stocks of companies who provide high risk loans to poor credit ratings people and this group of companies are the first to be hit by financial problems. NEW had been down 80+% in the last couple of months, but all the stocks had been hit. They got so low this week that a lot of hedge fund managers started speculating on a rebound and this spurred a bull market on this stocks. FMT was another stock in the field which did very well today (up 25.81%).

I was originally going to put about half my money into the subprime lender group, including FMT and NEW (3 other stocks which I forget but have written down somewhere) but I am absolutely not going to do it now. NEW is being in the midst of a criminal probe and FMT has been shut down by the FDIC. These stocks are teetering on the edge and the whole regional bank group is really weak. There’s no reason to look at these stocks when there are other, better stocks out there.

RIO, a mining company, is about to become a large part of my portfolio. also, ESRX, MHS and GT are buys. I might go GT, I might go Cooper Tire (CTB) tomorrow. I might do both. I’m just not sure. I think I’ll sell off most of my holdings tomorrow to pay for more RIO, more PALM and the above mentioned stocks. I was down today but not down by a lot and I’ll be in superb position tomorrow to make some moves. Sometimes you get beat by the market, that’s just how things are.

It looks like most of the most active stocks in the contest were down today as well. Unfortunately for me FMT and NEW were among the most active stocks and that should put a lot of people ahead of me tomorrow.

Update:

I actually did better than the market, I only lost .02% of my gains from yesterday:

Rank: 15347 (Top 7%)
Week to Date: 3.35%