Monday, August 4, 2025 -- $173,796.53 (-$19,777.52, -10.22%)

Monday, August 4, 2025 -- $173,796.53 (-$19,777.52, -10.22%)


"Margin Call"  These are two of the most dreaded words in the english language for an aggressive investor.  With the market concerned about the July jobs report and the downward revisions for May and June and with President Trump firing the head of the BLS, the market is losing confidence that the economy is on the right track and even whether future politically-driven appointments are going to present unbiased economic and jobs data.  As a result the market dropped.  And, top top it all off for me, INOD, the company I had just purchased additional shares in reported earnings in which EPS beat estimates but revenues were a miss.  INOD promptly plummeted almost 20%.  My recent purchase of 580 shares of INOD at $50.00 per share promptly plummeted, losing almost $6,000.00  Additionally, since I purchased these shares "on margin"--meaning I borrowed money secured by my stock portfolio--when INOD dropped and the rest of my portfolio dropped I received a dreaded margin call, meaning that my portfolio, due to the prices dropping, had insufficient equity to support my margin borrowing which totaled approximately $140,000.00  So, in order to meet my margin call I sold 1,000 shares of QBTS--after all, with INOD dropping so far so fast, it must be good investment now, right?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friday, October 3, 2025, -- $589,191.02 (+$34,914.67, +6.30%)

Image
Friday, October 3, 2025, -- $589,191.02 (+$34,914.67, +6.30%) This was another day capping a spectacular week (+54.71%) and month (+361.63%). The saying "15 minutes of fame" refers to a brief, brilliant moment of success that almost everyone experiences sometime in their life.  This past month was likely this portfolio's 15 minutes of fame—a performance unlikely to be repeated, at least not while its value is over $10,000.  Here is the graph for the past month: We human beings have a habit of normalizing our situation, perhaps because we are so adaptable.  That situation may be great or may be terrible, but we adapt.  As a result, a positive change in a poor situation may inspire joy in us and a negative change in a great situation may cause us angst and depression.   This feeling carries into investing.  While a month ago, when the portfolio was sitting just over $127,000, I would have been ecstatic to finish the year at $250,000.  Now, given the...
Read more

Thursday, September 11, 2025 -- $219,622.34 (+$45,825.81, +26.37%)

Image
Thursday, September 11, 2025 -- $219,622.34 (+$45,825.81, +26.37%) I am breaking with my usual end-of-day posts since I am busy tonight.  The big news is that the portfolio just hit a new all-time high of $219,622.34!  This is up over 26% from my previous post.  What you don't see is that the portfolio had plummeted recently, hitting a low of $122,953.19 on September 2nd, a staggering 43 percent drop from its previous high of $217,359.86 less than six weeks prior.  The graph below shows that recent, gut-wrenching low.  This volativity is not for the faint of heart! So, what fueled this recovery?  I made an extremely risky move that I neglected to post about earlier. On August 13th, I sold my entire INOD position of 1,580 shares for $43.04/share.  I then used a large portion of the proceeds ($40,300) to purchase 50 INOD call options with a $43 exercise price expiring on November 21, 2025.  Each contract cost $806.  This was a massive gamble....
Read more

Thursday, October 2, 2025, -- $554,276.35 (+$84,342.77, +17.95%)

Image
Thursday, October 2, 2025, -- $554,276.35 (+$84,342.77, +17.95%) In a bull market everyone is a genius!  That is how I feel now.  But life is fickle--tomorrow I could be the idiot who did not sell my overpriced positions and is wallowing in the depths of despair while my ultra-leveraged portfolio crashes and burns.  Clearly w hen the market seems to be a one-way street going up, it helps to be leveraged to the hilt and taking a long position in options which is adding more leverage on top of leverage.  But any significant downturn could crush this portfolio, as it has done in the past. I have changed the portfolio image that I am including each day to show each position's gain (loss) rather than the overall gain (loss) for that position.  This will allow you to better see what happened on that day.  My biggest positions, INOD and QBTS provided most of the gain, TSLA finally showing weakness (because of concern about future sales now that the EV tax credit i...
Read more