Pictures can speak louder than words. So here is a shot of the performance of my E*Trade account.
I’ve thrown together a few tools you guys can use to keep tabs on us. Subscribing to the InvestorGeeks feed is the first way, but we also do a lot of writing outside of the site. At Rollyo.com, you can use our custom-configured InvestorGeeks_Authors search engine which will search through a list of all the (more…)
Last time, I told you how I sold my Microsoft (MSFT) shares at $23. Afterwards, it sank under the $23 mark and hovered there for a few days. Yesterday, it closed up at around $23.50 on a day that saw a lot of return to tech stocks. What’s in store for Mr. Softy?
Today will be a big test for the stock. If MSFT breaks $24 today and stays well above $23.50 on Friday, I think we may have seen the true bottom for this episode. On the other hand, there is still a possibility the stock will sell off after these gains and plummet to new lows (look around May 6th on the chart above). How’s that for ambiguous?
adsense
I’ll be honest here. In true InvestorGeeks style, I’ve been winging it this whole time with MSFT as I brought myself up to speed on “technical analysis” and how to read charts. Below I’ll go through my evolution as a chart reader and technical analysis convert, and show you the different chart tools and technical indicators I’ve been looking at lately as I follow MSFT and other stocks. I’ll cover support and resistance levels today and go into moving averages, stochastics, and moving average convergence divergence (MACD). (I know you’ve been waiting for these guys, but just wait a little longer. It’s good stuff coming.)
Jason and Frank both purchased 100 share positions in Microsoft Corporation (MSFT) after its share price dropped 11% because of lower-than-expected earnings guidance. I wanted to chime in on my assessment of the company, and share why I think now is not the time to buy.
John Rhodes over at WebWord.com recently wrote an article on How Web 2.0 Killed Microsoft. The article points out a lot of the hurdles and challenges facing Microsoft as they try to keep up with the movement from desktop-based applications to online services. It’s a long article; here are some highlights:
The disruption afoot in the world of operating systems isn’t tied to the software resident on your own computer. Instead, the disruption is network enabled software, particularly software, data storage, and end user environments that reside squarely on the internet, but probably more specifically on the web. To be quite blunt about this, Google doesn’t give a damn if a web browser of any virtually flavor is running any particular operating system. The network is the computer, after all.
Web 2.0 developers are mostly yawning about Vista because they don’t need it. Like me, I’ll bet you haven’t seen much buzz on Vista coming from developers and designers. In the past, developers needed to care about the operating system, but no more. They obey few corporate masters because they feel liberated. They leash of Windows has been cast off.
As users adopt more and more Web 2.0 tools, they will get more comfortable with them. In turn, they will start to expect and even need these applications in their organizations. The enterprise will start to focus on web applications more and the operating system even less. To put this another way, Google and many other companies playing the Web 2.0 world, will slowly kill Microsoft. The mightly enterprise will move to align with user demands over time. It’ll be a glacial move, but it will happen as Web 2.0 continuosly demonstrates victory, and liberation.
Read on for my response.
I am the proud owner of 25 shares of Microsoft Corporation stock (MSFT: Google Finance, Yahoo! Finance). These shares were purchased on 3/23/2006 at a price of $27 per share.
After selling my SIRI stock last week, I was itching for somewhere to put that money. MSFT had been on my radar for a while and was an obvious target for me. It seems I wasn’t the only one considering investing in MSFT though, because the stock had a rally from the low $27s last Monday to just over $28 this Tuesday.
While I was pondering, a few things happened:
- Microsoft revealed their Origami handheld device.1
- Sony announced a delay in the release of their Play Station 3 gaming console.2
- Jim Cramer talked up the stock on his radio show… twice.
I thought I had missed the boat. But then this Tuesday Microsoft announced a delay of their own3. The consumer version of Windows Vista, the next installment in the Windows Operating System, will be released in January 2007 rather than the previously-planned “second half of 2006”. The “corporate version” is still planned to be released this November though.
News of the delayed release erased the previous week’s rally, taking the stock back down to the low $27s Wednesday. Is this my second chance to jump aboard the MSFT train? Is this a buying opportunity for MSFT?
With growing legions of users watching TV programming on their own schedules, and ultra-high bandwidth soon being pumped to every home, the dawn of digital media convergence will soon arrive, and Yahoo! and Microsoft are well positioned (and priced) to give investors a real bang for their buck.
What’s this convergence thing?
So imagine this: you’re at work and you just realized that you missed your favorite show last night. But you’re not worried. You log onto the web and download last night’s episode in digital quality for under a couple bucks. Within minutes it’s on your media player, and after you get home, you plug your media player into your home TV, and are watching it without the need to sit through all those darn commercials.