Jim Cramer has always said, its not “buy and hold” but “buy and homework.” Too many “investors” do not know what they own when they buy a stock, which is just reckless, but I don’t think its completely their fault. Most people don’t now how to do proper research, or have the background to understand how to do it. Even my friends who work at mutual funds often ask me where I get my info for the analysis I put on this site. This is why I started SuckingLess.com - an investor research and education magazine/community.

SuckingLess.com is a collection of the best industry and company websites to learn about the companies you own. When you own a stock, you’re, in a sense, an owner in the company. So, you should at least understand the basics of the business or industry, which means you should probably read what someone who works in that industry would read. Still, this ISN’T you’re actual job and making it so would be too time consuming, so I’ve also tried to filter SuckingLess.com to have only the most relevant and easiest to understand websites.

I want SuckingLess.com to be a COMMUNITY, a tool for ALL OF US. So, I invite everyone to come and participate on the site, SUBMIT your favorite research resource to help others learn the way I’m trying to get this started with my own favorite bookmarks. Please RATE the sites you’ve used before to help others know what’s most useful, and leave comments on how you’re using the sites or anything you’ve learned. Again, to help others. I’m sure you’ll learn something from the site, so give back a little and share your investing knowledge and experience with us!  Sometimes its not immediately obvious what you can learn from a website, so give people a little insight too if theres a special way you’ve found to tap into the markets with a certain website.

For example, I don’t have many resources on financials, healthcare, or retail/discretionary because, as readers of this site you know, I focus on industrials, tech, and energy sectors. So, help me learn a bit too!

Finally, PLEASE PLEASE send me feedback on how to make the site more useful to you. This is a tool for all of us, so lets make this what WE need to do the best research. And get your friends and trading buddies to help build SuckingLess.com too. Thanks and hope this is what we all need to become better investors, i.e. Suck Less!

P.S. 90% of mutual funds underperform the markets…so sucking is not something to be ashamed of. We just have to suck less as we learn more.

Wednesday’s Barron’s article “Other’s May Catch GE’s Industrial Disease” cites Goldman options strategists John Marshall and Stuart Kaiser recommending clients to buy puts on the Select Sector Industrial SPDR (XLI), a ETF that’s supposed to track the industrial sector. The recommendation was to buy XLI June 36 puts, which was trading around $1.10 while the XLI was trading at $37.37 at the time of the article. Marshall and Kaiser’s report cited the following reason (which I think is totally ridiculous):

“The GE earnings miss and guidance revision last week highlights how the increasingly weak macro environment can quickly sneak up on even the most diversified and well-run of industrials businesses,”

I would actually be buying calls in specific industrial names and have Honeywell (HON) and Union Pacific (UNP) calls on my book for the past 2 weeks.

My biggest problem with this recommendation is the XLI is about 18% GE (making the XLI basically a lite GE play), its kind of late to buy the puts AFTER GE took that dive from $37ish to$32ish! And why did GE take that big plunge? It sure wasn’t because GE is an industrial. It was because we found out GE was more of a financial than an industrial where GE’s financial unit took GE’s earnings per share down by 7 cents and negated any positives the industrial units were producing.

None of the other components in the XLI has any financial units like GE (hence they’re true industrials, unlike GE). After listening to GE’s call, one should actually be bullish on export industrials. Read the rest of this entry »

My thoughts are focusing on Japan’s GDP of 3.3 this early Monday morning. Some economists predicted a drop to 1.5 or below, with a upper limit of 3. A reading of 3.3 might spur another “yen carry trade” panic, though traders seem to have gotten more comfortable with their risks appetites with regards to the yen carry trade after the scare earlier in the year. However, I believe the potential damage caused by any unwinding of the yen carry trade would hurt more than the bond rates vs. Fed cutting rates scare we Read the rest of this entry »