Caitlin’s Investing Tip, Part II

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Molly Masters the Stock Market

By Molly Helgren*, WeSeed

I don’t have as much activity this week due to the fact that few things seem to be doing well. The most disappointing company in my portfolio this week was RIMM. I bought RIMM a few weeks ago when my Portfolio was just getting started because I love their products and couldn’t live without my Blackberry.

After their disappointing earnings announcement, though, I’ve lost well over $500 in 24 hours from that position alone. But I’m holding onto it for now with the hopes that it will make a comeback after the initial buzz over their earnings dies out.

Here are my trades for this week:

Sold 100 shares of Amazon @ 90.28 – Amazon had a great week last week, and made about $1,200. The big jump seemed to not be very characteristic, so I took advantage of the large gain and got out. I still love this company, and will probably trade them again in the future as their goal is to become the biggest online marketplace out there.

Sold 200 shares of GM @ .76 – Was up a penny from when I bought it! I gave it a week and it barely moved, so with everything going on with GM right now I figured it wasn’t worth the risk and I’d take my $2 in earnings.

Bought 100 shares of Google @ 500.83 – As soon as it hit the $500 mark, I figured it was time to jump on the bandwagon with the hopes that someday it’ll reach back up to its $700 price per share before the recession was in full swing. I also love the company – I use Gmail for my personal emails, and always use google for searches, maps, weather, etc. on my Blackberry.

Bought 100 shares of Kraft @ 26.51 – There has been little support for Kraft’s attempted acquisition of Cadbury over the past few weeks. My hope is that this has driven the price down so that now is the time to buy before a deal is reached and it’s back on the rise.

Sold 100 shares of Wal-Mart @ 50.96 – I bought WalMart over the summer with the hopes that back to school season would raise the price. But so far it has been one of the poorest performers in my portfolio, so I just wanted to get rid of it. I lost about $900, but at one point I had been down almost $1,500 so I am glad I waited it out a little longer.

Bought 100 shares of Nintendo @ 33.25 – They announced this week that they will be lowering the cost of the Nintendo Wii from $249 to $199. Just in time for the holiday season! I now own 200 shares of Nintendo.

Bought 50 shares of Visa @ 71.00 – I’ve only owned Visa credit and debit cards. They were also in the headlines this week for announcing a financial education plan for consumers.

Bought 100 shares of Microsoft @ 25.71 – I’ve noticed a significant increase in Microsoft advertising recently with the upcoming release of Windows 7. I’m hoping that if the launch goes well, the shares I buy now will be much more valuable come October.

Bought 100 shares of Ralph Lauren @ 72.87 – They make a wide range of quality products from clothing to linens. I’ve had them in my Portfolio for a few months now and they have been one of my top performers, making me over $2,500 so far. Since I’ve been so pleased with their performance, I wanted to risk a little more to see if they would continue to pay off. I now own 200 shares.

Bought 100 shares of TiVo @ 10.20 – How else would I have been able to watch the season premiere of Grey’s Anatomy last night when I got home late? I love their product. Mine is set to record at least two shows every night. I get watch TV now that I never would have prioritized into my routine without TiVo.

My Portfolio is still doing well with an overall gain of $13,466.63. I currently own 6650 WeShares and hold $291,887.63 in stock positions.

This week I lost about $5,000, but I don’t feel discouraged because percentage-wise, the market as a whole was down as well. My goal for the weeks to come is to not only make as much money as I should proportionally to the market as a whole, but to be making decisions that help me beat the odds.

Gain/Loss For Today:

-1,587.72

Current Portfolio Value:

1,013,421.78

WeShares Currently Own:

6650

Overall Gain/Loss:

13,422.03

Overall Trades:

85

WeSeed Cash Available:

721,586.50

*Molly Helgren is an executive assistant at PEAK6, WeSeed’s parent company. Molly is putting together a WeSeed Portfolio based solely on the companies that she knows and likes. So far, she’s doing pretty well.

Google and Microsoft Invade Each Other’s Wheelhouse

by Carlos Portocarrero, WeSeed Writer

Google (GOOG) is coming after Microsoft (MSFT), and they’re not being shy about it. Next year, Google is going to launch an operating system based on Chrome, their brand-spanking new web browser.

Google claims Chrome OS will start up in less time, and take up fewer resources, than anything else on the market. Translated: Google has got Microsoft Windows in their sights and they’re about to pull the trigger.

For its part, Microsoft isn’t just sitting around. Earlier this year, the massive company launched Bing, their new search engine. Google’s search had been the 900-pound gorilla in the search world and crushed its competition (remember Altavista? Ask Jeeves?), but a recent New York Times article suggests Microsoft’s new Bing has some skills of its own.

This means both companies are going after the other’s jugular: Windows is Microsoft’s cash cow, and search is where Google makes its green.

At first glance, a new operating system that claims to be faster and better than Windows could be all hype. But if you attach Google’s name to it, it becomes a pretty big deal. Besides, we’ve already seen what Google can do—their Chrome browser is noticeably faster (at least for this Google user) and less taxing on a computer’s resources than Internet Explorer or even Firefox.

That’s why I installed Chrome on my new Netbook—it runs a lot smoother than the other browsers out there. Google claims Chrome OS, which is based on the Chrome browser, will practically turn your OS into an Internet browser that runs your computer.

This is all part of Google’s overarching plan: their other applications (Gmail, Google Docs, etc.) are all meant to run in “the cloud”—which means they run off the web and not off your machine. Google is also going to give the new OS away for free—all they want is for more people to see the search ads they service.

Google fanboys—and there are many of them—shouldn’t get too carried away, though. This is still Microsoft we’re talking about. They’ve overcome countless accusations of doing shady stuff in the PC industry, and they’re still making huge bucks.

But all told, this is pretty fun to watch. If Bing was Microsoft’s uppercut at Google, then Chrome OS is a haymaker aimed straight at Bill Gates’s jaw. Can he bob and weave away from it, or will it be a knockout blow?

WeSeed Now Has Charts!

You asked for it.

You begged us for it.

You sent us message after message via our Feedback Form for it.

So we listened. WeSeed is proud to announce that we have added charts to the site! When you visit a company page from this day forth, you’ll never have to wonder what that company’s chart might look like.

Now all you have to do is click the “Show Chart” button and you’ll be rewarded with hearty, charty goodness.

On the left-hand side of a company page you’ll find the link to get your chart on:

Here’s what clicking on that button will get you:

What are you looking at? Well, the chart will default to show you what the stock has done over the past month. Which is all well and good, but it’s not good enough. So we decided to give you full control of these charts by adding the bottom navigation buttons. You can see what a company has done in the last day, five days, month, three months, six months, so far this year (YTD), and as far back as the company has existed. 

But wait, there’s more! You can also pick a start and end date to get the exact time frame you want. So let’s say I want to know how Microsoft (MSFT) has done since I got married last year, I’d just punch it in here:

And boom—here’s how the stock has done:

Hmm, kind of looks like a chart for the amount to time I spend playing video games since I got married – but that’s an entirely different story.

What can charts tell you?

Well, charts can give you some of the story behind a stock. But to be perfectly blunt, all a chart tells you is what a company’s stock price has done in the past. Will it tell you what the company does in the future? No.

Sound a little anticlimactic? It is.

But the fun part comes when you try to see if something that’s happened in the real world has had any effect on the stock price. Let’s take Apple (AAPL) as an example. 

A. The iPod launches
B. The iPod sells over a million units in a quarter for the first time 
C. The iPhone is announced
D. All hell breaks loose 

Now, it’s tempting to say that these things caused the stock to go up. And it might be true. The thing is, it isn’t the only thing that made Apple’s stock go up. But this is just an example of some of the stuff you can do with our new charts.

Now go out there and have some fun!

Content Spotlight: Hardcore Wii Gamers Want Games

Every so often we’ll pluck a piece of content we like from WeSeed.com and throw it on here. Why? Because we can. Now stop telling us our business and enjoy our brilliant copy. This one comes from the Gamers WeSeed Page:

by Carlos Portocarrero, WeSeed Writer 

Ask any serious Wii gamers what’s missing in their library of games, and they’ll probably all give the same answer: hardcore.

So far, Nintendo’s promises of bringing games to the Wii that don’t involve carnival games and yoga boards haven’t come true. Even Far Cry Vengeance, a wildly popular first-person shooter, fell flat in the transition to the Wii. For those seeking a bit of the ultra-violence, Manhunt 2 and its stabbing motions might have whet your appetite, but even then the Wii didn’t show as much gore as the PS2 version.

So is there any hope on the horizon?

The answer is a little complicated, but the good news is that there are a couple of titles that might quench the hardcore gamer’s thirst for some shoot ‘em up action.

Dead Space Coming to the Wii

This EA (ERTS) action-horror game came out of nowhere to become a huge hit on the PC, PS3 (SNE), and Xbox 360 (MSFT). Now there’s word that the game, which came out at the end of last year, will be ported over to the Wii. That’s the good news. The bad news: we don’t know if the game will be carefully ported over, or if EA will just bank on the game’s popularity to sell itself. In other words, it might turn out to be another Far Cry Vengeance—a crappy port of a great game.

If that happens, it’ll be a huge blow to Wii fans who want to blast away at more than cartoon chickens and ducks.

An Ice-Cold Contender

Then there’s the story of Winter, an adventure game set in a snowstorm that was originally pitched to publishers around two years ago. It’s centered around a cool premise of not freezing as you try to figure out why the world seems be going through some kind of big chill. And the control scheme fits the Wii to a T: For example, you open drawers by pulling on the remote as if you were actually opening a drawer.

Scope out the sweet trailer thanks to IGN:

Turns out the early build of the game got fantastic feedback… and yet they still don’t have a developer to publish it. Why?

Because prospective publishers think it’s “too hardcore” for the Wii.

That’s what we call ye olde Catch-22. If you want to read the whole story on Winter, check out IGN’s sweet write-up of the game. They also have some cool videos of the game in action. Very atmospheric and mysterious.

To read more about the game, check out The Hardest Level and their link to a petition to keep the game alive.

To me, this is a huge opportunity for a developer to step up and fill what is a clear void in the Wii market: hardcore games. Beside the graphics limitations, it’s probably the biggest complaint people have with the system.

Maybe if we’re lucky, we’ll see Sega, Activision Blizzard (ATVI), Take-Two (TTWO), or Nintendo themselves stepping up to the plate.

Until then, stay warm and enjoy the already-one-year-old bloodfest that is No More Heroes.