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Description:

As my portfolio name indicates: I have not been at this for a long time and work full time in an unrelated areas. I have had some success in following news stories and predicting what investors/ the markets reactions to them will be or what products will benifit from current reporting or actual situations.
Some other successes have come from being able to select what's best from recs. made by other investors.

For the *most* part...

1) Med. and long term I try to find companies with products or services that I think will experience fast growth as soon as some catalyst(s) X comes to fuition. I do some dd and intuite the odds I believe X has of happening, look at the risk reward ratio and decide whether or not to buy.

2) Short term I try to play over reactions to news stories and events.

(An example that happened just recently was the reaction to Venz. gov'ts announcement that it intended to nationalize VNT. I did some reading as the stock went down and it appeared to me that the gov't wanted to buy the company out. Not seize it. So I bought at the first indication of a turnaround at $11.80 on Jan.22,2006 on margin.Then sold on Feb. 6,2007, at near $6 on a day the stock went up to $6.50. I sold because I was satisfied with what I made and there were no garauntee on what would happen.
This was a ~35% gain on the shares bought at $11.80 and since it was on margin that made it 70% return on those moneies in 2.5 weeks. [ I actually did other buying at >11.80 and and selling a < 5.95 for smaller gains])

3) I know a few savvy investors and sometimes buy on their recs.

4) When I can't find enough stocks to meet the above criteria I try to put my money into a companies I think have much less risk.

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