Enginero.com `en-jin-neer-o`

This is an update for those of you who have were nice enough to make use of my Zecco referrals in the month of May. At this time, Zecco has not yet paid me for those referrals. They show the status of the referrals as all of the requirements being met, but I have not received payment yet.

I know of other people who haven’t had any problems with getting their referral monies credited, so at this point I am not too worried.

The Zecco site says:

“If you are a Zecco Trading account holder, the $50 cash reward will be credited to your trading account in the first seven business days of the next calendar month after your friend opens and funds a Zecco Trading account. If your Zecco Trading account is an IRA (Individual Retirement Account) or you do not have a Zecco Trading account, a $50 Amazon gift certificate will be sent in 2-4 weeks instead. This offer is only applicable to U.S. residents.”

Well, as of Tuesday, June 10th, it will have been seven business days since the start of the new month. If I haven’t received the referral bonuses by then, I will send them an email to inquire about the hold up.

Well, I decided it was too enticing to pass up, so I went ahead and bought 200 shares of Pinnacle Gas Resources, Inc. (PINN) stock. I actually put this order in 2 days ago, but I forgot to post about it to the blog. I know, I should be beaten with a limp noodle.

Play of the Day
I decided to pick up the shares based on a tip from a friend. I normally wouldn’t have just gone on advice, but I also agreed with the idea that having a Natural Gas holding was a smart play, even though I got in a little earlier than I should have.

The Numbers

• On 06/03/2008 I bought 200 shares of PINN at $2.53/share for $510.50.

Gain/Loss
Since this play is a purchase, there is no gain/loss breakdown. However, there is an instant loss of the trading commission I paid to Zecco. So, I’m down an instant $4.50, which is a very fair brokerage trade commission anyway. Three cheers for “pay to play” investing!

Disclaimer
If you research stocks online, you see disclaimers everywhere that someone mentions what they’re buying, selling, or even thinking about. Regardless of whether it is legally required or not, I’m putting one here, because I would feel terrible if someone took my advice and lost the farm.

So, all of my stock information is based solely on what I have done, plan on doing, or just came up with on the spur of the moment. Don’t take my investment discussions seriously, because I certainly don’t. I’m a web coder, not a market guru.

Do you agree or disagree with my play? Did you just dump this stock and now I own it?

Have you noticed how the titles of some of my blog posts are just silly? This post isn’t about that, but I just realized that I think must be instinctively trying to write silly titles…
Three cheers for random thoughts.

Anyway, I spent some time last night working on a stock ticker plugin for WordPress. You can check it out at my new Ticker page. The page lists the stocks that I’m currently holding and it pulls in some pertinent info from Yahoo Finance every fifteen minutes while the trading floor is open. This is the first, of potentially many, plugins that I have written for the blog and so far I am not entirely displeased with coding for WordPress.

But why its’ own page?
Well, my first inclination was to make the plugin automatically update the share prices of the stocks shown in my sidebar, but the drawback with that would have been page load times. i.e. every time you load a page on my blog it would connect to the Yahoo Finance stock feed to check for updates to display. I didn’t think it was important enough information to potentially slow down the load time of the web site, so I made the page for it. I also wanted to have more information about the stocks than what would fit comfortably in the sidebar.

What about Profit/Loss, etc…?
I am not sure yet whether or not I want to add the profit and loss information on the ticker page. In all actuality, I will probably add it, but for you now you can see what the shares cost me in the sidebar and see what they’re currently trading for on the ticker page. So, the information is there, just not aggregated in one place. As I type this, I am beginning to realize that I should probably just put it on the ticker page, but we’ll see.

At any rate, I would love to hear what you think…

Was it worth the 30 minutes or so of work to add?

I can hardly believe it, but I decided to pull the trigger on 500 shares of IndyMac Bancorp, Inc. (IMB) stock today. I say that I can hardly believe it because I’ve already burned up my 10 free trades for the month from Zecco and I had decided yesterday that I wouldn’t make another play (buy) unless I felt like it was too good to pass up…

Play of the Day
Then the IndyMac stock came into my sights today and I decided to just bite the bullet and spend the $4.50 to buy the stock. My prediction is a $3.00 share price by late next week. If that happens I will be ready to sell or reevaluate my position. As with all of my plays, my goal is a short term hold, but I’m prepared to hold longer to avoid loss.

The Numbers

• On 05/22/2008 I bought 500 shares of IMB at $2.00/share for $1004.50.

Gain/Loss
Since this play is a purchase, there is no gain/loss breakdown. However, there is an instant loss of the trading commission I paid to Zecco. So, I’m down an instant $4.50, which is a very fair brokerage trade commission anyway. Three cheers for “pay to play” investing!

Disclaimer
If you research stocks online, you see disclaimers everywhere that someone mentions what they’re buying, selling, or even thinking about. Regardless of whether it is legally required or not, I’m putting one here, because I would feel terrible if someone took my advice and lost the farm.

So, all of my stock information is based solely on what I have done, plan on doing, or just came up with on the spur of the moment. Don’t take my investment discussions seriously, because I certainly don’t. I’m a web coder, not a market guru.

Do you agree or disagree with my play? Did you just dump this stock and now I own it?