tyberius

As I said you don't know what you're doing. You cackled and mocked and did all your standard BS, but I told you, you don't know what you're doing.

Gut instincts and market timing are not an investment strategy.

Now you want to emotionally make it better for yourself by buying more here because you're off 4%. So you did something clueless the first time for strategy, now you are thinking about doubling down on the standard clueless response.

There's a good analysis that was done out there with grad students (i.e. people you could confidently indicate were not just dummies) and let them manage a $25k portfolio. In general they burned it to the ground.

The worst strategies depend on gut feeling and predictions like what you're trying to make.

Even if your underlying prediction is good (like say record numbers of people flown) there are so many side possibilities (protracted economic war with Russia pushing oil way up) that on any given day you don't know how the market will interpret the same piece of news. Shrug, down, or up. That's the problem with simplistic thinking.

What's more, if the market starts *expecting* record results on a monthly basis, as has been happening, that information is *priced in*. Now they want you to not only set a record every month, but the size of the record has to grow. If the direction of record growth changes, oops. Crash. So many ways that positive news can be interpreted negatively. So you really never know. Record earnings talks about yesterday, what they care about is what comes next. So what comes next for you Air Canada? $150 oil because now we have full blown Soviet Union Evil Empire type of relations going on with Russia? Who knows.

Lastly there are guys who are ahead of the sheep they lead to slaughter. These guys buy on the rumor and sell on the news. The sheep buy during the runup, then the positive news comes out and the stock tanks and they are left holding their losses going why, why? The why is because the stock was no longer interesting as a momentum play. As long as that news was sitting out there as a future possibility they know the sheep will keep pouring in and they help set that up. Then on the day the positive news is announced they slit the sheep's throat and suck up all that nice blood. Sheep are not prepared to react to positive news by selling.

You never know when this particular thing is going to play out.

As a result, you are doing no more than gambling.

Now, as an uneducated gambler you are feeling worried and bad about your 5% loss you're showing on your gamble. Maybe you're not so smart. After all someone warned you and you mocked him.

So what you want to do now is "make it ok" by turning your 5% loss into a buying opportunity. But you need to call it what it is to the gambler. You're gonna double down. Increase your risk and your exposure.

Instead of making a nice smart investment strategy, now your gut feeling got you into a fast 5% loss, and now you're going to to increase your risk to justify the initial investment which may have been wrong (or right). If it keeps falling you're going to keep doubling down until you're borrowing money.

If this Russia thing turns into a shooting war, you can watch oil go up, travel stocks go down and who knows what happens. Maybe a 20% pullback in the market over a 2 day period. Then the sheep start to worry and start selling.

So the gambler has mortgaged the house in order to make himself basically FEEL BETTER when the stock is falling and the next thing you know, poof. You threw all this money away speculating.

If you want to do it for fun, you can join investing clubs and do it for fun. If you are gambling, there are better stocks to gamble on. Picking the one that you like to rah rah on a message board about as a company may not be the best pick to gamble on because you're too emotionally tied into trying to constantly prove yourself right on this board. Which makes it even MORE of a "you don't know what you're doing" situation.

So here you are. You've made yourself the perfect storm by first, taking every single post here about this company personally. Then you've gone out and announced that now you're putting money into it. There is no way you can make rational decisions at this point because you are already out of your mind in terms of how much this board affects your personal sense of cred. And now you're going to work an investment to basically buy yourself cred on a messageboard.

Don't know what you're doing.

The boring investment advice is the best. Join competitions for doing gut feelings and this kind of stuff. Unless you have so much money and discipline that you can put aside a separate account that you will not pour money into and call it the arcade. In the arcade anything goes for all your wild gut feelings and market timings.

So, more free advice. Don't throw good money after bad. You made your wager. Don't try to pat your emotions on the back by upping your bet. All of these things show poor risk analysis skills.

You made your bet. Sit on your bet. See how it works out. Maybe good or bad. Either way you have a lot to learn about this. You can refuse to admit it which just means over the long haul the real men are going to take away all your lunch money. A stopped clock tells the right time twice a day. A dead cat can indeed bounce. If you call the first three flips of a coin correctly, it does not mean you will get the next three wrong, or the next three right. You got lucky. It's gambling.

Right here you flipped a coin. You called heads, right now it's tails. You won't say you were wrong about your bet. In the morning it could very well be heads. If it is you will indeed say you are right and take credit for it. It doesn't mean it is smart or a strategy it means it is gambling and over the long haul they will take your lunch money. People like you just fuel the profits for people like them.

But hey. Don't say you were not warned. The advice is to buy some real books about how to invest and learn it. Market timing is not even a strategy for the big guys. You've got people who have been howling sell this darn bull market for the last few years. They keep saying there's going to be a correction.

Eventually there will be one. Maybe this is it right now. It's looking pretty sketchy out there. When it comes, each one of these guys will be like you and say SEE, SEE? I WAS RIGHT.

Yes, if your clock is stopped on midnight eventually it will be midnight and you can have your moment of glory and say see? This clock WORKS. Then it is over and it's back to being wrong for 11 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds.

All those end of the world types kept people out of the market that has been going up and up. You can't time it.

But what you can do is manage risk. Note, you don't control it. You manage it. You will get stung when everyone else gets burned. You will do nicely when everyone else is shining bright. But if you manage your risk your investment will grow and you will not be one of those guys who is knocked out of the game and that is the first rule.

Don't get knocked out by making foolish, risky decisions, based on lack of information, and lack of understanding, especially those that are gambles.

In a rising market the right move is to not take it all out (try to time the market) or put it all in (try to time the market) but to leave enough in to ride the wave, while meanwhile peeling off high risk and moving into low risk and balancing out the portfolio. In the opposite market as the market ages, buy into risk that will benefit when the economy bounces.

Now is not the time to buy AC. The time to buy AC was at the one dollar levels. Like where I bought it. I flushed it out when I tripled my money then I walked.

I don't try to time the top. I saw my opportunity, made good money, walked. Let the guys who are planning on holding to the top do so. Only one guy gets to sell at the top.

Ultimately airlines are stupid investments and what goes up will come down. It's just the sheep that run in at the end and lose all their money. I've been raising cash, no more investments, for a while now. Making sure that when the tide turns and everything falls apart, like it will for sure, I will have the means to pick up people's broken plans and make some money off it.