Work
Work today was pretty boring. Lots of paperwork doing the everyday things for patients in the ward. Now that I'm in a General Medical team (having had an Emergency Department term and a General Surgical term previously), I'm handling lots of old people with multiple medical problems and multiple drugs. Polypharmacy is not good.
Have been able to get off work on time pretty much everyday since I've started except for the days on which I have rostered overtime, so the workload's not too bad.
Finance
Today my mobile phone was buzzing almost nonstop with stock price alerts via SMS messages from my online broker. It was mostly good news. Stocks in which I had puts in generally went down and stocks in which I had calls in went up. =-)
One thing that bugged me today was this Aussie zinc miner that I bought a few days ago. Pasminco's the name of the company. Last week, they announced a profit warning, saying that they were going to lose money in the coming second half of this year, especially since the price of zinc had been coming down lately. The stock price had sunk to a multi-year low - it had been as high as $2.50 two to three years ago and was trading at as low as 22c last week. I went over their figures many times. Their net assets were worth, I thought, closer to $1 per share. The price of zinc can't stay down forever ... and the price/volume graph showed amazing support at the 22c level.
My work is preventing me from stock trading properly. I first noticed Pasminco as the price fell down through the 30s. Did my homework. As it fell down to 28c, I actually told my flatmate that if the price fell down to, say 20-22c on high volume and jumped back, it would be a classic inverted island reversal. Sure enough, the company stock had a day trading at 22c, with volume done equal to a full 25% of the total number of shares, and promptly jumped back to the 28c range the next day, also on high volume. I only managed to buy some shares at 28c.
Yesterday, I managed to convince myself that the reversal measured to at least 55c, and possibly to anywhere north of $1. I bought more at 33c and gave myself a mental stop loss position if it traded below 30c.
Today, the stock traded as low as 28.5c. I saw this during my half hour free to watch stocks during my lunch break (my mobile had warned me it went below 29.5c earlier). I decided to stick to my guns and sold out.
Arghhh...... didn't have any time to check the market until after the close ... sure enough, Pasminco rose back up to close at 32.5c. Grrr..... it went down enough to shake the weak longs (including me) out and went back up.
Ohwell. There's always another opportunity to buy in again if it continues heavenward. Besides, my options in several other stocks look like they'll more than compensate for my trading loss in this stock ... =-)
In other financial news, European stock indexes are all pretty much looking pretty grim as of this writing and Globex futures are looking pretty bearish too for the US stock indexes. Expect a big downday today. This must have something to do with what the market expects of Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve's expected interest rate cuts this week. muahahahaahahahaa