Shameless Opportunist

A log of online contests, giveaways, investment opportunities, unorthodox ways to make money and everything else related to personal finance.

Thursday, April 21, 2011

Win a copy of Eternal Rider!

This giveaway is for a paranormal romance novel by Larissa Ione. (Whatever happened to the normal romance? *g*) If you want to win it, head this way. The giveaway ends on Sunday night.

Win a copy of Flowers Bloom!

The "Wild About Nature" blog is giving away a copy of Flowers Bloom by Mary Dadson Wade. It's about flowers. That bloom. :) What's not to like? :))

If you want to win your very own copy of the book, head thataway.

Updates

Updating a blog on a regular basis is probably an acquired habit - I know that because I have yet to acquire it. :) In my defense, I just haven't come across a lot of contests that award extra entries in exchange for blog links.

So, what's new in the life of everyone's favorite shameless opportunist? Well, I flipped some stocks. :) I still haven't found a good, safe, underpriced company with a good margin of safety (aka "the moat") that I'd be willing to invest in for the long term. ISRG seems to meet most of my criteria, but if you look at its 5-year chart, you'll see for yourself how big its price variations are. No bueno. I got it for $357 a share when it started going up a couple of weeks ago, missed the selling opportunity when it got to ~$375, and bailed when it dropped back to $361. Not exactly my finest investment move, but hey - profit is profit.

I flipped BRKB for a couple of bucks and got back in again last Friday at $81. After all the bad publicity caused by the Sokol/Lubizol insider-trading affair, Buffett is finally getting some good news: his investment in GS finally got paid off with a 30% interest ($1.2 billion!), and he most likely has some other good news under his belt. As his renegade biographer Alice Schroeder points out, he always releases great news right before his annual shareholder convention. I expect the share price to go up even higher within a week. Today the trading closed at $82.36, or a total of 1.6% profit haha. Again - it's not much to write home about, but that's a solid 1.6% gain in only five days' time. I'm fairly certain there are some CDs that pay just as much in a year.


The TradeKing promotion with a $100 signup bonus for new accounts appears to be over...