Investor's Meeting

I went to my first meeting with the investor's group I talked about here. I have to say I wish I had known about this group long before now. Not only are the meetings and membership FREE, but they also served free food and drinks at the meeting. You can't beat that! I told a friend of mine, who is also a RE investor, about this meeting a couple weeks ago, and he also made it there.

The group's moderator started the meeting by showing a slide of the night's discussion topics. The only downside (if you want to call it that) about the group is that it focuses on all kinds of investing - mostly stock and options trading. So the meeting was about 95% about the moderator's activities since the last meeting (earlier this month). The very last part of the meeting was a presentation by a seasoned RE investor, who was going to talk about the Austin RE market. The moderator had the RE investor and another gentlemen stand up as they were two of the "big" players in the group. According to the moderator, the RE investing had been doing flips and what-not since right after high school. I kid you not, he looked about my age or older, which tells me he's been doing this a LONG time. Unfortunately, the moderator's presentation dragged on and I had to cut out before listening to the RE investor's presentation.

Anyway, the moderator does nothing but trade stocks and options (and only a very small bit of RE investing). As he was going through his presentation I was dumbfounded at how much knowledge this guy had. He was throwing up articles and charts and graphs and so on and talking terms I've never heard of before. The two things that really caught my eyes and ears was the level at which this guy "plays". He brought up one slide that showed a single stock he'd bought and sold in which he made $10,000 in less than a day. He's not a day trader, according to him, but just happened to get in on a stock whose company was getting bought out later that day. In-between his Greek terminology, he mentioned that he bought five blocks of 500 shares each of the stock, which on the chart was trading at about $20/share. That equates to $50,000 to me and this is just one of gazillion stocks he owns.

Another thing I liked about the guy is he really knew what he was talking about when it came to fundamentals. He had articles and reports and so on from analysts and who knows who supporting his decisions. But he was also humble about it and made sure we knew that he DID have down days/weeks, too.

A couple of things I wrote down that he mentioned in particular had to do with some of his plays. Disclaimer: I am NOT giving any advice here - only what this guy had mentioned. Basically, he started getting heavy into shipping companies recently. Not air freight companies, but companies who ship large items over the water. He had put up a chart on the group's site a couple of weeks ago, and mentioned that even during the time he posted the chart until the meeting last night, several of the stocks had already jumped another 20% (and this was already on top of having big gains before). He also said that grain ETF's, like DBA and RJA are looking good.

The reason? China.

China is supposedly becoming a HUGE consumer and the demand for commodities is growing exponentially in the country. This, according to him, was the reason he got into the shipping stocks and the reason they have risen when most of the market is falling. Again, there were a lot of articles and charts and what-not he put up to support all this assumptions, but just him showing the charts on many of the stocks and their performance the last few weeks was enough telling for me.

His big prognostication is that beef will be HUGE the second half of the year. He even had an article showing a press release from Tyson in which they said that the demand is going through the roof and prices will raise accordingly. Another article showed that the people in China will be the main influence as they are showing no resistance to already growing prices there and the demand is actually seen as growing.

All-in-all is quite interesting to see how this guy goes through his daily routines of getting up early, investigating resources on the web and other places, looks at financials, etc., and makes his calls. He has no formal job - just plays the market (and does it well). I was definitely impressed.