Skip to main content

Happy New Year 2011 !

Happy new year to all my readers ! It is your feedback (as comments as well as in person) kept me going with my almost weekly blog. It helps me personally to articulate my thoughts and also make personal investment decisions - thanks to all of you !


Year 2010 is over. It's time to reflect on past year and get ready for new year.


Let's start with how my recommendations in 2010 did. If you are regular reader of my blog, along with my commentary on markets, politics, economics and occasionally on other events (like World Cup), I have made stock recommendations in almost every post with target buy prices. Assuming one does around $1000 investment in those recommendations at target buy prices, the portfolio would have returned approx. 17.77% for year 2010. Though it is not as stellar as last year's performance of 80% , it still beat S&P by 5%. Not bad considering till Nov, it was lagging S&P by couple of percentage points.


Here are top 3 winners and losers of last year's recommendations:
Winners:
  1. Atlas Pipeline Holdings (AHD): Gain 170%
  2. SFI Preferred (SFI-PD): Gain of 170% (including dividends)
  3. Crosstex (XTEX): Gain of 63%
Losers:
  1. Allied Irish Bank (AIB): Loss of 77%
  2. General Maritime (GMR): Loss of 53%
  3. Bank of Ireland (IRE): Loss of 42%
Overall out of 39 recommendations which I tracked as "shadow" portfolio, there were 27 with positive returns and 12 with negative returns. For every loser, there were three winners. I am satisfied with my recommendations and returns for 2010.
Now that is past - let's look at 2011.
Year 2011 is starting with lot of optimism in the air and quite a bit of momentum in economy as well as markets. There are still clouds about Europe, Japan and to some extent US growth and unemployment. However general sentiment is much better than at start of 2009 and 2010.
Here are some market predictions:
  • US indexes would cross following milestones in 2011:
    • DOW: 12500
    • S&P: 1340
    • Nasdaq: 3000
    • 10-year treasury yield: 4%
    • Unemployment: Below 9%
  • Emerging markets would continue to do well with Shanghai index crossing 3300 and Mumbai BSE index crossing 23000
  • Other major indexes
    • FTSE to cross 6200
    • Nikkei to cross 11000
    • DAX to cross 7500
    • Hongkong Index to cross 26000
Here is my first stock(s) recommendation of 2011

I am going back to my investment thesis of finding "out-of-favor" sectors and potential catalyst. At this moment, I see for-profit education sector has most upside potential of 2011. With republicans gaining control in congress, it would slow down potential regulatory impact on these companies which is not fully reflected in their stock prices. With this in mind, here are stock(s) recommendations with potential of 30% plus gains in 2011:
  1. COCO at $5
  2. CECO at $20
  3. APOL at $39
That's all in my first blog of 2011. Once again, happy new year to all of you, your friends and families !

/Shyam

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Clicks to Tokens: Will 2026 Echo 1998's Boom or 2000's Bust?

My "blogging" was in hibernation last 8 months due to my self-imposed restraint given the environment as well as built-in inertia to get started despite so many interesting events and markets reaching all time highs after taking a big dump around "Liberation Day" in Apr...Around that time I had the blog ready that it would be repeat of Mar/Apr 2020 panic and recovery during onset of Covid Pandemic. The hunch happened to be correct and I was glad that I could keep and take some positions which I am still holding especially around AI theme. But that was then...as 2025 is about to wrap up in 10+ weeks, let's look at what's in store for rest of 2025 and 2026. And what's better time than to start writing again just before one of the most important week on the calendar with multiple key events coming up next week... Fed meeting to decide the course of interest rates - it's almost guaranteed that Fed will cut rates by 25 basis points (2nd time in 2025) and...
Post a Comment
Read more

2026: The Year of Convergence – Melt-up, Moonshots, or Mid-cycle Correction?

Happy New Year! After another period of self-imposed hibernation from the blog—partly due to the festivals, travel, intertia and partly to watch the dust settle on a chaotic 2025—I decided to use the quiet of this New Year’s morning to finally reboot.  Looking back at my October post,  “Clicks to Tokens,”  the hunch about the AI theme held firm. We spent much of 2025 debating whether we were in 1998 or 2000. As we enter 2026, the answer seems to be "neither and both." We have the roaring optimism of the 1920s fueled by "Silicon Spirits," but with the high-speed volatility of the 2020s. So, as the calendar flips, what is in store for 2026? Markets may experience melt-up (S&P touching 8000),  with some moonshots (like SpaceX and OpenAI) IPOs or even see mid-cycle correction bringing down S&P to 6000. That's a wide range and will be decided by Four R's... Here are my thoughts on the " Four R’s ":  Rates, Robots, Rotations, and Real Assets. 1. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Rockets, Relics & Roaring Markets: The $4 Trillion Crossroads of 1927 and 1999

Happy (almost) Summer! After watching Kevin Warsh get sworn in at a White House ceremony two days ago, tracking three S-1 filings that could collectively hoover up more capital than every U.S. IPO since 2022 combined, and watching 26-year-old stock charts finally break to new highs — it felt like the right moment to ask the uncomfortable question out loud. Are we at a party that ends gracefully, or one that ends with the furniture on fire? The market is simultaneously flashing the neon signs of 1999  and  the orchestral excess of 1927. Most commentators reach for the dot-com playbook. I think the original Roaring Twenties is the better map. Here's why... Assembly Lines to AI Clusters Ford's River Rouge complex was the largest industrial facility on earth in the 1920s — raw iron in one end, a Model T out the other. Steel, rubber, and oil became the picks-and-shovels of the age. GE and Westinghouse were electrifying factories and homes. The infrastructure buildout  was ...
Post a Comment
Read more