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The FREE Generous Thursday Competition!
February 11, 2008
The Yalicoo traders’ community has grown substantially over the past few months, leading us to broaden and improve our system. Among these improvements, we have upgraded the site's design and made it much more user-friendly.
Thus, we would like to invite you to participate in a special FREE competition (is that generous or what..?!).
This special daily competition will take place on Thursday, February 14, 2008. The competition rules and prizes are the same as any other daily competition, but there is no entrance fee; you are welcome to join for FREE!
This is going to be an exciting and challenging competition as many of our all-time expert traders have already registered to the game, and we expect many others to join in the coming days. Don’t miss your chance to participate in this unique event, learn from great investors and win cash prizes for creating the best performing portfolio.
Here is the direct link to
JOIN the FREE Thursday Competition!
Last week's top stories
Wall Street ended another rough week of declines, as the credit market dragged down the financial sector and broadened concerns of impending severe recession. The financial stocks led the declines that started Monday, after UBS and Merrill Lynch issued sell ratings on several big firms such as American Express (AXP), Capital One Financial (COF), Wachovia Bank (WB) and Wells Fargo (WFC).
After declining for three straight days, the media sector helped provide some relief from the recession anxiety that has plagued markets over the past few months. Walt Disney (DIS) reported earnings that beat analysts' expectations, citing strengths at its ESPN cable network and its theme park business. Another company to beat analysts’ expectations was Time Warner (TWX). Time Warner’s new CEO Jeff Bewkes presented his vision for changes at the media conglomerate, which included dividing AOL's online access and advertising businesses and possibly spinning off the rest of the company's cable division.
In other earning news, Cisco Systems posted in-line quarterly numbers following the closing of the Wednesday session. The NASDAQ index received another push on Friday thanks to Amazon’s stock buyback plan. Amazon (AMZN) said its board approved a plan to buy back $1 billion of the company's stock over the next two years. The company also said it was setting up a program to buy back debt.
Despite these positive issues, the financial sector continued to slow down the market due to continued uncertainty over the impact of the credit market crisis. Analysts are expecting the coming months, at least until mid 2008, to be quite volatile with possible additional decrease in the indexes.
Yalicoo competitions summary
Agent (20.37%) advanced to first place in the
quarterly competition, while TheTrader (14.56%), who also moved up one place to second place, is still in the game and BULLitPROOF (9.68%) and all the other players are far behind. Keep in mind that the NASDAQ fell more than 13% since the beginning of 2008; thus, the returns of most top Yalicoo players, even the ones who are not leading the game, beat the market by a substantial magnitude.
After declining for the last six months, TerreStar Corporation (TSTR) stocks rose more than 20% after the wireless communications company said it has secured a $300 million investment for its integrated mobile satellite-terrestrial communications network; agent was at the right place at the right time in order to catch this quick flight. He also probably knew when to buy shares of TBS International Limited (TBSI), which looks like a bull pick at least for the near future. Considering the volatility of the market and the fact that we still have almost two months left, anything can still happen on the scoreboard.
The
monthly competition scoreboard changed again last week. Currently, Iverson (7.62%) is in the lead followed by yhjia (4.99%) and gooD (4.09%). The recent ups and (mainly) downs of the market seem to make it harder for the well known leaders to sustain their higher scores. This provides a unique opportunity for new players to show their skills and position themselves in the top half of the scoreboard.
Stock market trivia: Where did the bull and bear come from?
A bull investor is someone who believes the stock market will go up and a bear investor is someone who believes the stock market will go down. In other words, a bull market is a rising market and a bear market is a falling market.
Where do "bull" and "bear" come from? One common myth is that the terms "bull market" and "bear market" are derived from the way those animals attack their enemy: because bears attack by swiping their paws downward and bulls toss their horns upward. This is a true feature, but it is not the true origin of the terms.
Long ago, "bear skin jobbers" were known for selling the skins of bears that have not yet been caught. They were actually the first short sellers (investors selling shares that they do not own, hoping prices will drop so they could buy them back and return them to the debtor), and this was the original source of the term "bear".
As for the origin of the bull term, it is not fully clear, but because bull and bear baiting were once popular sports, "bulls" was understood as the opposite of "bears". Thus, the bulls were those people who bought in the expectation that a stock price would rise.
Certainly, no one can argue that both animals are intimidating and should best be avoided. Maybe they are meant to serve as a warning to investors: Unless you know what you are doing, you could get hurt.
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