Nasdaq 100 Quotes

2. Don’t trade penny stocks. A penny stock is any stock that trades under $5. Unless you are an advanced trader, you should avoid all penny stocks. I would extend this by encouraging you to also avoid all stocks priced under $10. Even if you have a small trading account ($5,000) or less, you are better off buying fewer shares of a higher-priced stock than a lot of shares of a penny stock. That is because low-priced stocks are most often associated with lower quality companies. As a result, they are not usually allowed to trade on the NYSE or the Nasdaq. Instead, they trade on the OTCBB ("over the counter bulletin board") or Pink Sheets, both of which have much less stringent financial reporting requirements than the major exchanges do. Many of these companies have never made a profit. They may be frauds or shell companies that are designed solely to enrich management and other insiders. They may also include former “blue chips” that have fallen on hard times like Eastman Kodak or Lehman Brothers. In addition, penny stocks are inherently more volatile than higher-priced stocks. Think of it this way: if a $100 stock moves $1, that is a 1% move. If a $5 stock moves $1, that is a 20% move. Many new traders underestimate the kind of emotional and financial damage that this kind of volatility can cause. In my experience, penny stocks do not trend nearly as well as higher-priced stocks. They tend to be more mean-reverting (Mean reversion occurs when a stock moves up sharply from its average trading price, only to fall right back down again to its average trading price). Many of them are eventually headed to zero, but they are still not good short candidates. Most brokers will not let you short them. And even if you do find a broker who will let you short a penny stock, how would you like to wake up to see your penny stock trading at $10 when you just shorted it at $2 a few days before? I learned that lesson the hard way. It turned out that I was risking $8 to make $2, which is not a good way to make money over the long term. To add injury to insult, a penny stock might appear to be liquid one day, and the next day, the liquidity dries up and you are confronted by a $2 bid/ask spread. Or the bid might completely disappear. Imagine owning

Persson did not create Minecraft because he wanted to create a billion-dollar company; he loved video games and kept his day job while developing it. When the game soared in popularity, he started a company, Mojang, with some of the profits, but kept it small, with just 12 employees. Even with zero dollars spent on marketing and no user instructions, Minecraft grew exponentially, flying past the 100 million registered user mark in 2014 based largely on word of mouth.2 Players shared user-generated extras like modifications (“mods”) and custom maps with each other, and the game caught on not only with children but their parents and even educators. Still, Persson avoided the valuation game, refusing an investment offer from former Facebook president Sean Parker. Finally, he and his co-founders sold Mojang to Microsoft for $2.5 billion, a fortune built on one man’s focus on creating something that people loved.3 On the other end of the spectrum is Zynga, one of the fastest startups ever to reach a $1 billion valuation.4 The social game developer had its first hit in 2009 with FarmVille. Next came Zynga’s partnership with Facebook that turned into a growth engine. The company began trading on the NASDAQ in December 2011 and had 253 million active users per month as late as the first quarter of 2013.5 Then the relationship with Facebook ended and the wheels started coming off. Flush with IPO cash, Zynga started exhibiting all the symptoms of ego-driven, grow-at-any-cost syndrome. They moved into a $228 million headquarters in San Francisco. They began hastily acquiring companies like NaturalMotion, Newtoy, and Area/Code. They infuriated customers by launching new games without sufficient testing and filling them with scripts that signed players up for unwanted subscriptions and services. When customer outrage went viral, instead of focusing on building better products, Zynga hired a behavioral psychologist to try to trick customers into loving its games.6 In a 2009 speech at Startup@Berkeley, CEO Mark Pincus said, “I funded [Zynga] myself but I did every horrible thing in the book to just get revenues right away. I mean, we gave our users poker chips if they downloaded this Zwinky toolbar, which . . . I downloaded it once — I couldn’t get rid of it. We did anything possible just to just get revenues so that we could grow and be a real business.”7 By the spring of 2016, Zynga had laid off about 18 percent of its workforce and its share price had declined from $14.50 in 2012 to about $2.50.

When playing a bear market, the same rules hold: You want to diversify your risks, especially knowing that collapses move even faster than rallies. You need to decide how much safe cash or near cash you want to hold to sleep at night and to handle financial emergencies, like the loss of your job or your house. Then decide how much to put into longer-term high-quality bonds, like those 30-year Treasuries and AAA corporates, but I think it’s still premature to make this move at the time of this writing, in August 2017. Then decide how much you want to put into a dollar bull fund or the ETF UUP, which tracks the U.S. dollar versus its six major trading partners. If you’re willing to risk part of your wealth, you can also bet on financial assets going down—from stocks to gold. Stocks are the one type of financial asset that goes down in either a deflationary crisis, like the 1930s, or an inflationary one, like the 1970s. So shorting stocks is the best way to prosper in the downturn, either way. But don’t leverage this bet. The markets are simply too volatile. You can short the stock market with no leverage by simply buying an ETF (exchange-traded fund) like the ProShares Short S&P 500 (NYSEArca: SH). It’s an inverse fund on the S&P 500, so if the index goes down 50 percent, you make 50 percent. The ProShares Ultrashort (NYSEArca: QID) is double short the NASDAQ 100, which is likely to get hit the worst. If you make this play, just do a half share, to avoid that two-times leverage (hold the other half in cash or short-term bonds). Direxion Daily Small Cap Bear 3X ETF (NYSEArca: TZA) is triple short the Russell 2000, which is also likely to lead on the way down. So buy only a one-third share of this one, to remain without leverage. (That means the money you allocate here should be one-third in TZA and two-thirds in cash, to offset the leverage.) And unlike the gold bugs, I see gold collapsing. It’s an inflation hedge, not a deflation hedge. If gold rallies back as high as $1,425—on my predicted bear-market rally—then it could easily drop to around $700 within a year. Your last decision is whether to risk some of your funds betting on gold’s downside, for the greatest potential returns. You can buy DB Gold Double Short ETN (NYSEArca: DZZ)—double short gold—at a half share, to offset the leverage, or just simply short GLD, the ETF that follows gold. There you have it. How to handle the coming crash.

The Netscape offering changed that equation. Originally, Netscape planned to sell 3.5 million shares to the public at $14 each, a price that valued the company at about $500 million. Given that Netscape had posted only $17 million in sales—sales, not profits—during the previous six months, a half-billion-dollar valuation seemed highly optimistic. But not to investors looking for the next you-know-what. Netscape’s roadshows were mobbed; tech geeks who had never before bought a stock wanted to own the Navigator. One technology stock analyst said getting a session with Netscape’s management before the offering “was like getting a one-on-one with God.”3 With demand overwhelming, Netscape and Morgan Stanley, its underwriter, increased both the size and price of the offering, eventually selling 5 million shares at $28. Still, demand far outstripped supply; investors placed orders for 100 million shares, and Morgan Stanley had to decide which clients to favor with the limited number of shares it had available. “They don’t get any hotter than this,” the Journal reported the morning that Netscape opened for trading. With so much unmet demand, it was obvious that Netscape would begin trading far above the $28 offering. After struggling for hours to set a price, the Nasdaq’s market makers finally opened Netscape at $71 per share. It rose as high as $75 before settling back to end the day at $58.25. At that price the company was valued at more than $2 billion—one hundred times its trailing sales.

Each ETF represents a certain index. So the ETF for the S&P 500 trades under the ticker SPY. The ETF for the DJIA trades under the ticker DIA. And the ETF for the Nasdaq 100 trades under the ticker QQQ. You've probably heard of the QQQ. It is a great trading or investment vehicle. When you buy shares of the QQQ, you are getting exposure to Apple, Netflix, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and many other tech (and some non-tech) stocks. If you buy the QQQ and hold it for the long-term, you will be able to profit from the long-term growth of the tech industry.

Some smart people came up with the idea of the ETF ("exchange-traded fund"). An ETF trades just like a stock. You can buy or sell it all day long in your brokerage account. Each ETF represents a certain index. So the ETF for the S&P 500 trades under the ticker SPY. The ETF for the DJIA trades under the ticker DIA. And the ETF for the Nasdaq 100 trades under the ticker QQQ.